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Tools

One neutral table of the tools and projects that exist for the Naya Create, what each can and cannot do, where it runs and under which license, followed by the house rules every tool user should follow. The one thing to know: every tool that writes can damage a keymap or park a half in its bootloader, and each was measured only on the firmware versions named below.

At a glance

  • Quit NayaFlow completely before running any other tool: one program owns a port at a time.
  • Read fe/1002 on both halves before any recipe; the halves can run different firmware.
  • OpenFlow is the full configurator; nayactl is a read-mostly command line; Create Companion maps module gestures per app; create-legacy-firmware archives every release and firmware image.
  • The never-send list lives on Troubleshooting; it is not repeated here.

Golden rules

  1. One owner per port. Quit NayaFlow completely (the app, flow-bg-server and NayaCore) or release OpenFlow's ports before running a script. On Windows a busy port reports "Access is denied"; a killed script can leave a Python process holding the port, which looks like a dead keyboard MEASURED (owner's machine, Windows, 3.41.0 and 3.28.7, 2026-09-10 to 09-19).
  2. Wake the halves first. The first connect can take about 1 s; nayactl retries its opener at 0.3, 0.7 and 1.0 s STATIC1. The first fe/1001 on a freshly opened port often gets no reply even with both halves awake on USB (23 of 30 nayactl connections), so retry it MEASURED (owner's board, 3.41.0, 2026-09-01; see Transport). How an idle or sleeping half answers is not measured yet.
  3. Check the firmware of both halves. Read fe/1002 on each half's own port and through the left at dst 0x51: halves can run different firmware, and a half can miss a vendor update without any warning (a board arrived with left 3.41.0 and right 3.35.4). While they differ, the right half's own port answers with empty payloads, but the version read through the left port at dst 0x51 still reaches it MEASURED6.
  4. Read before you write. Save a read of every store you are about to change; OpenFlow reads only until you flash STATIC.

Comparison

Tool What it does Platforms License Measured on Limits
OpenFlow Configurator and NayaFlow rebuild: keymaps with up to four behaviors per key, LED maps, modules, settings, Bluetooth slots, firmware flashing of the vendor's images, read-only bootloader probe Windows, macOS (arm64, Intel), Linux open source keyboard 3.28.7, 3.35.4, 3.41.0 recovery operations and pairing repair ship switched off; Linux untested with a keyboard
nayactl Command line: status, module, Bluetooth and LED reads, key-scan listen, raw frames Linux, macOS, Windows Apache-2.0 3.30.1, 3.41.0 no REMAP read or write, no flashing (details below)
Create Companion Maps module gestures (sent as F13-F24) to per-app actions on the host Windows, macOS MIT module 2.3.3 needs one module flash first
create-legacy-firmware Archive of every stable NayaFlow release and the firmware images carved from them; flashing procedure any Apache-2.0 (its own files) 3.35.4 and 3.41.0 (flashes of 2026-09-20) installers kept out of git
createflow-dongle Open firmware and flasher turning an nRF52840 stick into a Bluetooth-to-USB bridge macOS, Windows, Ubuntu 24.04 (flasher) Apache-2.0 keyboard 3.41 fixed report map; no configuration over Bluetooth

Which tool for which job: read the state of a board (nayactl status, OpenFlow, the Python recipes); change the keymap or LEDs (OpenFlow, NayaFlow); flash firmware (OpenFlow with the images from create-legacy-firmware, or NayaFlow's bundled image); recover a parked half (see Recovery); bridge Bluetooth to USB (createflow-dongle); per-app actions for modules (Create Companion).

OpenFlow

OpenFlow is an open-source configurator for the Naya Create and an independent rebuild of NayaFlow: an Electron shell, a React (Vite) renderer and a Python FastAPI backend on a vendored nayactl, over USB CDC. It keeps NayaFlow's process split and HTTP contract (the same route and SSE names, default port 3001, the renderer's fallback), so NayaFlow's user-data.db imports directly STATIC (OpenFlow).

Fact Evidence
It does keymaps with up to four behaviors per key (called "OneKey"), the full 136-entry LED map, module configs and gestures, timeouts and LED settings, Bluetooth slots, firmware flashing of the vendor's own images, and a read-only bootloader probe; recovery operations and pairing repair ship switched off. STATIC
Safety gates: the only writing route /rpc/flash needs {"confirm": "FLASH"} and an explicit profile; firmware flashing needs OPENFLOW_ENABLE_FIRMWARE_FLASH=1, pairing repair OPENFLOW_ENABLE_PAIRING_REPAIR=1, recovery operations OPENFLOW_ENABLE_RECOVERY_OPS=<list>; a flash holds one lock across every frame so the status poll cannot slip between frames. STATIC
It splits every write into at most two frames on record boundaries, which keeps firmware 3.28.7 from wedging. STATIC MEASURED (donor board, 3.28.7, 2026-09-19)
/rpc/release-device and /rpc/reconnect-device free and retake the ports without a USB re-enumeration, so NayaFlow or a script can use the keyboard while OpenFlow runs (the NayaFlow side is not yet verified). MEASURED (donor board, 2026-09-19) STATIC
Its single-file probe (naya-probe.py, pyserial only, read-only) lists Naya PIDs, reads versions and bond tables (and the partner's version through the left half; it does not show Bluetooth reads through that route, because they answer for the half you are plugged into), reads both slots of a half in MCUboot and names them against the firmware catalog's hashes, captures the bootloader console, and writes JSON. It sends no reset, upload or pairing command. STATIC
It ships a firmware catalog of 63 images across the 25 stable releases (26 keyboard images, 6 module bundles, 30 .sfb files, 1 dial image) with sizes and hashes; the images themselves come from create-legacy-firmware. STATIC
Reference data: app-shortcuts.json (150 applications, 19 853 chords, merged from ShortcutMapper (MIT) and the Create Companion catalog; every chord checked by OpenFlow's encoder), shortcut-dictionary.json (95 entries: 79 captured from a real NayaFlow flash, 13 computed, 3 from the encoder), action-chords.json (610), nayaflow-action-names.json (860), key geometry as NayaFlow 1.25.1 draws it, NayaCore vocabularies, stock module profiles. DOC
Module-profile exchange format openflow.module-profile v1: moduleType required (TOUCH, TRACK, TUNE, FLOAT), bindings keyed by gesture id, axis pairs written "<kind> - <minus> - <plus>", optional split with - (left, up, counter-clockwise) and + (right, down, clockwise) halves, variant; importing always creates a new profile. DOC
It logs every device exchange (category, subcommand, payload prefix, port, time, result) in a 500-entry ring plus daily files kept 14 days; its bug report strips hardware ids, Bluetooth addresses, USB serials and UUIDs by default and shows the payload before sending. STATIC
Packages: a Windows NSIS installer and a portable exe, macOS arm64 and Intel (unsigned dmg), a Linux AppImage and deb built on the oldest Ubuntu runner (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and newer). Version and download links at release. STATIC

nayactl

nayactl is a Python command-line tool by Cory Bennett (Qonfused), Apache-2.0, Python 3.10+, click and pyserial (pyzmq optional and unused); main at 8049c9f (2026-09-07). Commands: scan (the only one that opens no port), status, module info/battery/status, ble address/pairs/status, led on/off/brightness/effect, keyscan, listen, text, raw CAT SUBCMD [PAYLOAD]. It reverse-engineered the framing, the XOR checksum, the categories and the opcode map independently (from a NayaFlow 1.19.1-era NayaCore). Five binary commands and two text commands need --force STATIC1.

Limits of upstream main, as read on 2026-09-22 STATIC MEASURED123. In short:

  • No REMAP read or write (no continue flag, so raw reads stop at the first chunk; no byte-3 countdown).
  • No SMP, so no firmware flashing and no view of a half in its bootloader (the recovery, third-mode and generation-B PIDs are unknown to scan).
  • led brightness N and led effect N send one byte, which 3.41.0 zero-fills to level 0 / effect 0.
  • Its Bluetooth status decode differs from the measured 239-byte layout past the header.
  • The destination follows --side (default left), so always pass --side.
  • Text commands only work on firmware older than 3.31.1; the dongle's port does not answer its opener.
  • ZMQ discovery is Linux-only and no ZMQ transport exists.
  • On 3.28.7 it may open the half's non-answering second CDC interface; a USB re-enumeration mid-read crashes status (issue #3); nayactl -v status crashed on a Windows cp1252 console.

History DOC1: pull request #2 (merged 2026-09-07: module type from the dock address, Windows serial fixes dsrdtr=False + write_timeout=2.0, multi-line text replies), #5 (merged 2026-09-07: precise module battery is millivolts), #6 (open, another contributor: ed/1012-1014, LED map reads), issue #1 (open: detection for NayaCore 6.9.2 and later), issue #3 (open: crash on disconnect), issue #4 (closed by #5). Pull requests #2 and #5 came from the OpenFlow author. OpenFlow vendors nayactl at 72a6af2 (the #2 merge) unmodified and imports only constants, transport, discovery, protocol, util, types; #5's fix sits in cli/status.py, so library users do their own millivolt handling STATIC.

Create Companion

Create Companion (Rust, Windows and macOS, MIT) flashes a module once so that its gestures send spare function keys F13-F24 (HID 0x68-0x73), then maps those keys per foreground application on the host STATIC DOC4.

  • Default Tune transport on Windows: dial clockwise / counter-clockwise F24 / F23, one-finger tap F22, one-finger swipes left / right / up / down F20 / F19 / F18 / F17 (macOS has no F21-F24 and uses F20-F14).
  • Modifier namespaces let two modules share keys (a modifier counts if it went down within 100 ms before the key); streamed gestures collapse to one action within a 300 ms gap unless "Follow swipe" is on; host-side dial acceleration curves; exports openflow.module-profile files; a catalog of 162 applications, websites and systems with 22 646 shortcuts. v0.1.0 2026-09-06, v0.2.0 2026-09-07.
  • Its measurements of what a module sends (two-finger Tune swipes stream 11-20 events by motion; one- and three-finger gestures fire once on release; modifiers arrive per event) are the public source for Module fields MEASURED (owner's board, module 2.3.3, 2026-09-05). Because the firmware has no macro table, a host engine like it is where macros belong INFERRED.

create-legacy-firmware

create-legacy-firmware (public) is the archive of all 25 stable NayaFlow releases (MANIFEST.json with GitHub digests, CHANGELOG.md, changelogs/), the firmware images carved from each release's NayaCore (firmware-history/, OpenFlow's firmware library, described in FIRMWARE-HISTORY.md), the beta channel's record (firmware-history-beta/MANIFEST.json for all 16 beta releases, plus the six keyboard images of 3.39.4, 3.40.0 and 3.40.4, kept apart so no flasher offers them), FLASHING-PROCEDURE.md (including the section measured on hardware on 2026-09-20), and the scripts download.py, verify.py, tools/carve_fw.py, tools/extract_history.py, tools/flash_map.py. The installers stay out of git. License: Apache-2.0, matching OpenFlow, covering the repository's own documents, manifests and tools, not the vendor firmware images or installers it archives STATIC DOC5. Its FIRMWARE-HISTORY.md says the beta regeneration script is not published yet.

createflow-dongle

createflow-dongle (Apache-2.0, not affiliated with Naya) is open firmware plus an Electron flasher that turns an nRF52840 USB stick (EBYTE E104-BT5040U or Nordic PCA10059) into a Bluetooth-to-USB bridge for the Create: it pairs with the keyboard as a Bluetooth central and HID-over-GATT client and presents the keyboard's own report map over USB. Firmware 0.1.3 (DFU package v18); releases 0.1.1 to 0.1.3 (2026-09-10/11); Zephyr on nRF Connect SDK 3.4, no MCUboot, Nordic's open DFU bootloader; the flasher is tested on macOS, Windows and Ubuntu 24.04 DOC7.

  • The replacement stick enumerates as VID 0x1915 PID 0x520F "createflow Dongle": a device with that identity is this project, not Naya's dongle. Its limits: a fixed report map and no configuration over Bluetooth DOC INFERRED7.
  • Its published Bluetooth measurements on 3.41 (the GATT table, the idle 0x1234/0x5678 pipe that answers no configuration frame, the 212-byte HID report map, encryption level 2 with a Just Works central, the stock dongle's behavior) are cited on Bluetooth REPORTED (createflow-dongle's own measurements)7.

The vendor's release repositories

NayaTech/NayaFlow-releases (25 stable releases) and NayaTech/NayaFlow-beta-releases (16) are still public; they let anyone re-derive the static findings on this site. They are vendor-owned and may disappear; create-legacy-firmware mirrors the stable channel's assets and records every beta release's firmware DOC895.

Commands no tool should send casually

The canonical never-send list is on Troubleshooting and the recovery steps on Recovery. For tool authors, two notes:

  • ee/10be (DFU reset), fa/1002 (format partition) and fa/1006 (erase chip) are never-send. ee/10ae parks a half in its bootloader (no lights, no typing, looks bricked) but is the first step of every stock update and is undone by an SMP os reset sent to the port that answers SMP (back in about 8 s) MEASURED6. The text commands clear_bonds and mcuboot_reset are answered only by firmware older than 3.31.1 DOC. fe/100a is SET ACTIVITY TIMEOUTS, and NayaFlow sends it on every flash MEASURED (captures, 2026-09-01).
  • Hazards to add to any tool's list (each measured): a hold-tap flavor byte of 4 or more (stops every key until the board is unplugged, 3.41.0); any write needing three frames on 3.28.7 (the half wedges until replugged); BT_OUT on battery with no reachable host (the keyboard froze until a power cycle, 3.41.0); &tog 0 from a higher layer; ed/1013 value 0 (persistent dark keys); a one-byte ED payload (zero-filled); nayactl's raw sends 30/10ca and Bluetooth unpair or clear without --force MEASURED (owner's board 3.41.0, 2026-09-03/11; donor board 3.28.7, 2026-09-19) STATIC1.

Open questions

  • OPEN Whether OpenFlow's "release device" lets NayaFlow open the ports while OpenFlow runs (details).
  • OPEN OpenFlow on Linux with a real keyboard and the udev rule (details).

Sources

  1. nayactl, github.com/Qonfused/nayactl (README, constants.py, transport.py, issues #1, #3, #4), read 2026-09-22. ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. nayactl, pull request #2 and its comments. ↩

  3. nayactl, pull request #6. ↩

  4. Create Companion, github.com/create-collective/create-companion (README, docs/PLAN.md, presets/default-config.toml). ↩

  5. create-legacy-firmware, github.com/create-collective/create-legacy-firmware (README, MANIFEST.json, FIRMWARE-HISTORY.md, firmware-history-beta/MANIFEST.json, FLASHING-PROCEDURE.md, LICENSE). ↩↩

  6. create-legacy-firmware, FLASHING-PROCEDURE.md, "Measured on hardware, both halves (2026-09-20)". ↩↩

  7. createflow-dongle, github.com/mediaandmerch/createflow-dongle (README, firmware/VERSION, firmware/src/usb_hid.c, docs/findings.md, releases). ↩↩↩

  8. NayaTech/NayaFlow-releases. ↩

  9. NayaTech/NayaFlow-beta-releases. ↩