Royal Kludge 84 Down :(
She's dead Jim, but there are more positives than negatives in the story.
A few weeks ago, I randomly found an open source project that claims to program and configure Royal Kludge keyboards, which sounded awesome. The programming on my RK boards required digging out my wife's old laptop, but otherwise worked okay. So I gave it a try, all I did was run the app and plug in the keyboard.. And... Bricked. Note all I did was plug it in, I did not change anything, did not load, save, anything. Just instantly dead.
And I mean bricked in the actual sense of the word. The RK84 normally shows up as a composite USB device; the USB Hub and the keyboard itself. The keyboard never showed up again. I could do some FN+key presses to modify lighting and such, but no USB events were emitted, etc. ☠
I'm very hesitant to mention the project, but feel like I should. Rangoli. Do not use it under any circumstances; it will possibly ruin your keyboard and repair/reflashing may be impossible.
Recovery Attempts
Several years ago I had an issue with my Royal Kludge 68 and RK support were super helpful and helped me recover it, so I contact them and within days they gave me an exe to try to recover the keyboard. No joy, a few days later, another exe. A total of three attempts and RK support apologetically said they had exhausted all options they could think of to try and offered me a discount on a new keyboard. At the time I didn't really need a new keyboard, as I do have my RK68, but they went above and beyond to help me recover the keyboard and I'm really appreciative of their efforts.
Not All Is Lost!
I contacted Royal Kludge again to ask if it would be possible to possibly do any keyboard reviews for them. Partly because I enjoy doing reviews, partly on a whim to see if I could replace the keyboard while doing a review for RK. Not that my blog is huge, but it gets views, and particularly, my keyboard posts seem to perform well. And to my utter amazement, they came back with options that fit perfectly! I look forward to what they send me and learning more about QMK/VIA. Watch for upcoming posts, I'll keep the specific model a surprise until then.