I bought an L1KVM a while back. Since day one I was having problems with my keyboard. After lots of debugging I ended up with a Keychron Q1 and a Razer Viper Ultimate mouse. I recently, FINALLY, disabled NKRO on my keychron and this seems to have resolved majority of my issues. Everything now works flawlessly… 80% of the time. The other 20% are weird issues with the keyboard.
After disabling NKRO I’ve experienced three scenarios:
Keyboard doesn’t do anything. Seems like the keyboard is frozen. Keys aren’t registered and hot keys, like disabling the RGB don’t work either.
Keyboard key gets stuck. While I was in a game, it seems that my “A” key got stuck in pressed mode? Other keys somewhat worked, but the keyboard was being really weird. All I know is I just kept moving left.
Missing keystrokes. There was a weird delay in keystrokes and some keystrokes just wouldn’t register.
All these issues were resolved by unplugging my keyboard and plugging it back in. I am using a coiled usb cable, so the length is really long, but other than that, the only things plugged into the KVM are my monitors and mouse. Also, as said, the keyboard is a Keychron Q1, so this is a QMK keyboard.
Oh, and I’ve also upgraded to the latest firmware of this keyboard if that makes a difference. VIA is able to detect the keyboard, through the KVM, and I’ve remapped a couple of my keys. Remapping works flawlessly.
unplug all the devices from hid ports, plug only the keyboard into a hid port, power cycle the kvm, then try that.
since the hid ports are all scanned by the kvm, you can have other devices that do weird stuff like change their polling rate, go to sleep, etc. that can interfere with the hid part of the kvm. also hid devices that also do non-hid things can cause side effects on the hid ports.
finally it is worth trying different upstream ports on the connected PCs because some usb ports are ‘native’ some from the chipset and some may be a 3rd party usb controller.
Thanks Wendell. I had a “Freeze” experience again. I will try doing the power cycling because this mouse may be a little weird. As for the ports, I can try to swap them around. I know I have it plugged into the back of the computer, but I don’t know if it’s on a USB 2 or USB 3 port. I’ll investigate. As for the second computer, there’s only one usb port… I hate company computers.
Hey @wendell, so I tried your suggestion and it didn’t seem to work. What I did was:
unplug my mouse and keyboard.
plug my keyboard back in
unplug the power cord to the KVM
plug it back in
test out the keyboard to ensure it’s working
plug mouse back in
I’ve also plugged in the usb into another port on the board. The motherboard that I’m using is a ROG Strix Z490-F. The Laptop that it’s plugged into is an HP Elite book.
Do you have any other troubleshooting suggestions? Because you mentioned polling I’ve shutdown my Razer synapse to see if that resolves the issue, but I think I’ve tried it before.
That is interesting you mention synapse. I’ve had every single symptom you mentioned on my setup (no kvm tho) and traced it down to synapse causing it. restarting/shutting down synapse in the middle of the episode would fix the issue.
Ugh, Synapse is an awful software. All these “Gaming” softwares are garbage and I get so frustrated with them. I just wanted to set the DPI on my mouse, but to do that I need to install all this stuff. A while back I had MSI afterbuner, I think, installed on my system and it’s “performance mode” was disabling my internet. I just wanted to change the RGB on my GPU but ended up losing a ton of hours.
Hopefully with this disabled it’ll work now that I’ve cycled my KVM and disabled NKRO.
Hey @wendell, wanted to thank you for your help. Your mention of polling seemed to get me on the right track. I’ve replaced Razer mouse with a generic logic mouse and it seems to be working as expected now. I guess those “gaming” mice really screw around with the KVM switches. If this keeps up I’ll probably run a double mouse setup. Not ideal, but it is what it is.
I’ll leave this setup running for the next 2 or 3 days. If I get no more oddities, I’ll know that it was the mouse that was causing me an insane amount of grief.
sounds good. the kvm supports up to 1khz but it isn’t a great idea to mix polling rates across inputs to the kvm and the usb3 is more tolerant of weird stuff than the hid ports for what that’s worth.
Hey Guys, I just wanted to finally put an end to this crazy saga that I’ve been going through. I initially thought that the KVM was the problem, but TBH, the kvm is flawless. Apparently my Keychron Q1 is having issues and that’s what was causing issues with the freezing. I have a new board coming in from Keychron.
During that time I tried other KVM switches and the L1 KVM is miles better. I couldn’t get any keyboards working properly with other KVMs through the HID port. Even with a malfunctioning keyboard L1 KVM was able to run 90% of the time properly. I’m just glad that my Keychron was under warranty.
Just wanted to talk everyone, and especially wendell, for the time to help me resolve this issue. I’m glad I finally figured out what the problem was.