Case study

HHKB Professional Classic: vendor HID and firmware investigation

HHKB-reverse-engineering investigates the vendor USB HID protocol of the HHKB Professional Classic keyboard. It documents 64-byte request and response frames, command behavior, keymap layouts and firmware-dump behavior, with macOS IOKit tools for probing and changing keymaps.

Targets: Firmware · Protocol
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 1
Last commit: 2026-09-21
Language: C
License (GitHub): MIT

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

Copy as Markdown View JSON Cite

Evidence

Observed: Code and documentation observed; no download method or demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-08

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Building the tools requires the Xcode command line tools.
Scope: The author reports measuring the findings on a PD-KB401B with firmware A4.29 under macOS 27.0.
Limits: Firmware flashing is not implemented; the author reports that dumping firmware leaves the keyboard read-only until it is unplugged and replugged.
License: MIT License.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{hhkb-professional-classic-case,
  title = {{HHKB Professional Classic: vendor HID and firmware investigation}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering}},
  url = {https://github.com/m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/hhkb-professional-classic-case/}}
}

Plain text

HHKB Professional Classic: vendor HID and firmware investigation. https://github.com/m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/hhkb-professional-classic-case/

Useful? Star Awesome REA on GitHub2.4k

About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.

Report an outdated entry Suggest a translation fix

Primary sources

README.md GitHub · m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering · Revision 33db390
docs/protocol.md GitHub · m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering · Revision 33db390
docs/firmware.md GitHub · m1sk9/HHKB-reverse-engineering · Revision 33db390