If your Keyboardio Preonic shows "connected" but stops typing, forgets its pairing, or won't reconnect after your computer wakes from sleep: those are firmware bugs, and a free community firmware now fixes them. We built it and we're typing on it.
The board
The Keyboardio Preonic is the wireless take on the Preonic layout, with the name licensed from OLKB. It pairs with up to four devices over Bluetooth and has a rotary knob and a glowing butterfly logo. Configuration happens in Chrysalis rather than QMK. If you have an OLKB Preonic (Drop's Rev 3 or the upcoming Apos Rev 4), none of this applies to your board.
Why we did this
It seems Keyboardio isn't maintaining these keyboards anymore. The last firmware fix landed in September 2025, and the Bluetooth complaints since then have gone unanswered, documented in GitHub issues and across the Keyboardio forum and Discord. The Preonic was supposed to go on general sale in the fall of 2025 and never did. In January 2026, Jesse announced a new AI startup, so it's assumed the project has been abandoned.
We have a Keyboardio Preonic ourselves and ran into the same Bluetooth and battery issues, so we worked on fixing them for ourselves and for the community. Ours gets used most days, with Gateron Oil King switches and SA Oblivion keycaps swapped in.
What's fixed
- Won't reconnect after your computer sleeps or reboots (the keyboard stopped advertising after 60 seconds, in a mode macOS ignores, at radio power no host could hear)
- "Connected" but no keystrokes register, worst on Windows 11 (pairing data lost to a race with deep sleep, or saved under a corrupted filename)
- Endless forget-and-re-pair loops
- Touching the rotary knob after idle locks the whole keyboard until you touch it again (issue #1534)
- Low battery puts the keyboard into a sleep only the power switch can exit
- Switching device slots (Fun+1 through 4) could cross-wire pairings between computers
- The last keystroke autorepeating on the host forever
- Two crash bugs, and lower battery drain while sleeping disconnected
Where the fixes came from
The reconnect-after-sleep fix is pull request #1540 by zachgersh, which testers confirmed months ago but was never merged or shipped by Keyboardio. We applied his fix as-is, with credit in the commit history. The rest came from our own read-through of the Kaleidoscope Bluetooth code and Keyboardio's nRF52 radio stack, chasing down the symptoms users had reported in the GitHub issues and around the forum and Discord. Every change is public in the two source repos, with a write-up of each bug in the project README.
Installing it
Flashing takes about two minutes, and you can return to official firmware through Chrysalis any time.
The easiest path is Chrysalis in Chrome or Edge. Connect the keyboard over USB, then open the sidebar and pick Firmware Update.
Select Custom firmware, then choose the Preonic-community-v1-dfu.zip you downloaded from the release page. The Factory reset switch on that same screen covers the required reset, so turn it on for this first flash.
If you'd rather skip Chrysalis: hold the Hyper key (bottom-left) while plugging in USB, drag the .uf2 from the release onto the PREONICBOOT drive that appears, then do the full reset described on the release page.
Either way, forget the keyboard in your OS Bluetooth settings afterwards and pair fresh. Pairings created by the old firmware can be corrupted in ways new firmware can't repair.
The other Preonic, if you'd rather go wired
The OLKB side of the family is back on sale. The Apos x OLKB Preonic Rev 4 moved from waitlist to pre-order, from $150 for the barebones kit to $205 fully specced as of August 2026, with kits expected to ship at the end of November 2026. The full price table is in our Rev 4 post.
The kit is the CNC-machined anodized aluminum case plus the redesigned 4-layer hot-swap PCB, with per-key RGB, underglow, an RP2040, and QMK. At checkout you pick from three case colors (black, silver, or yellow), and you can add XDA dye-sublimated PBT keycaps in QWERTY or Colemak along with switches, either Gateron Yellow KS-3 linears or TTC Silent Bluish White V2 tactiles. Keycaps and switches can both be set to None if you're bringing your own. We covered the full spec sheet in our Rev 4 post.
Pre-order the Preonic Rev 4 at Apos
Where this goes
A v2 is in progress that remembers which Bluetooth slot you were on across power cycles. If you've been living with a flaky Preonic, or put it in a drawer over this, it's worth the two minutes.
