Idle & Burn-in Protection

OLED pixels that show the same legend for hours can burn in. To prevent that, PolyKybd moves through a few states while you’re away and wakes instantly the moment you come back.

The idle sequence

1. Awake — normal, full-brightness legends.
2. Fade — after an idle timeout the keycaps dim.
3. Idle — the displays run an anti-burn-in animation (see below).
4. Off — after a longer timeout the keycaps switch off entirely.

Any key press wakes them — and if the optional light sensor is fitted, so does reaching toward the board.

Idle styles

Style	What it does
Pulse (default)	Each key gently “breathes” its brightness out of phase with its neighbours. The lit pixels don’t move — simple, and the legend stays glanceable.
Jitter	Keeps the breathing, but each key also relocates its legend to a fresh random spot whenever its own pulse dims it to black. The lit pixels migrate per key, so no pixel stays lit in one place.
Eden	A full-screen screensaver: a procedural “comet field” streams across all keycaps, with the key legend drifting over it as a dim overlay. Pretty rather than glanceable — the moving pixels give strong burn-in protection.
DOOM (IDDQD)	Plays the DOOM easter-egg’s attract demo across the keycaps as a screensaver. Needs the DOOM egg installed first (see the caveat below) — otherwise selecting it has no effect.

Pulse and jitter keep the dimmed legend readable so you can glance down and resume typing; jitter adds stronger burn-in protection by moving the lit pixels. Eden and DOOM trade that glanceability for a full moving picture — they’re screensavers, so the pixels never rest in one place. Any key press dismisses them instantly.

Note

The Eden screensaver runs on the split72 keyboard only. On the split42 it falls back to Pulse. You can also replay the Eden animation once (as a boot-style intro rather than a loop) from the host or the EDEN keycode.

DOOM needs the easter egg installed

Unlike the other three, the DOOM (IDDQD) screensaver isn’t built into the standard firmware — it only works once you’ve set up the DOOM easter egg: flash the DOOM-pack firmware, then install the game data (polyctl doom install doom1.whx) and the engine pack (polyctl doom install-pack doom_pack_v2.plyx). The shareware game data is a free download (keyboards/polykybd/doom/tools/dl-doom-data.sh, or grab it from a release). Without the game data the demo falls back to a placeholder fire animation; on firmware without the DOOM pack, choosing this style simply does nothing.

Choosing a style

Firmware protocol v4+ selectable idle style

• Tray menu — right-click the PolyKybdHost tray icon → Idle Display → Pulse, Jitter, IDDQD, or Eden.
• Command line — polyctl idle-style pulse (or jitter, iddqd, eden).

Your choice is saved on the keyboard and persists across reboots.

Note

Each half runs its own idle animation on its own keys — only the style (pulse, jitter, Eden or DOOM) crosses the split link. See Display power states for the full state machine.