No, you can setup a dongle with bluetooth. In a regular zmk setup with nice!nanos or whatever bluetooth MCU, the two halves communicate wirelessly over bluetooth, a central one that does all the calculating of what key presses to actually send, and a peripheral that just sends raw keystrokes to the central one. But with a dongle setup, you’d get a 3rd MCU that you plug into the computer that acts as a central board without any keys that has 2 peripheral boards it communicates with. Because you’ll keep that 3rd MCU plugged into the computer, it won’t need its own battery or even any components, it can just be a bare MCU. You could also make a case for it if you wanted:
One thing I noticed is some of the case are labeled
row x column
and somecolumn x row
. I believe the standard isrow x column
, so the cornes, for example, should be3x6
.