luckybipedal

joined 2 years ago
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Building a custom keyboard to match my Kinesis Advatage 360 Pro in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Ergodox has a layout similar to Kinesis Advantage keyboards, particularly the thumb cluster. There are low profile versions of it. A quick search got me this: https://www.slicemk.com/products/ergodoxlp-wireless

Does the keyboard I want exist? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Everything except the Y key you can get with a Perixx Periboard 535. It uses mechanical Choc switches.

The closest thing I've seen to moving keys to the other hand is keyboards with two B keys, so you can type it with either hand. I haven't seen that for the Y key.

You didn't specify whether you want row-stagger or column-stagger. Given that you don't want to change your typing habits, I'm guessing row-stagger is what you'll prefer. Transitioning to column-stagger would throw out a lot of your muscle memory and require some time to adjust, especially if you're used to non-standard fingering. Typing Y with the right hand would be a minor change in comparison.

40
Introducing Kühlmak, my layout analyzer and optimizer (github.com)
 

After a few years of tinkering and learning I'm finally ready to share the result of my work. Meet Kühlmak. What started out as my attempt to create the perfect keyboard layout morphed into a project to make a flexible and fast analyzer and optimizer. The feature highlights:

  • Command line interface
  • Information-rich, text-based layout overview and stats
  • Support for different types of physical keyboard layouts and fingerings (row-staggered, angle-mod, column-staggered and more)
  • Extremely fast analyzer that enables simulated annealing
  • Multi-threaded annealing to find many optimized layouts quickly
  • Multi-objective fitness function with soft targets for individual objectives
  • Multi-objective ranking system to identify the best trade-offs out of many generated layouts
  • Metrics that naturally favour finger and/or hand balance for effort, travel and n-grams
  • Finger travel distance weighted by speed (inspired by Semimak)
  • Comprehensive same-hand bigram, disjointed-bigram and same-hand 3-gram scoring system
  • Support for affinity of Space to one thumb or both
  • Optional constraints to enable steering certain layout features (e.g. preferred positions of punctuations and shortcuts)

The terminology and metrics are partially inspired by and partially adapted to The Keyboard Layouts Doc (2nd edition). However, I made some deliberate design choices and probably introduced more subtle biases that deviate from some of those definitions. There is lots more information in the README.

At this point I consider it ready enough to finally optimize a layout for my Mantis keyboard and see if it works as well as I hope it will.

Flippable PCBs in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The "half-swept" version of Sweep does that already: https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep/tree/main/Sweep%20half-swept

The easiest way to make the board flippable if to mount the controller upside-down on one side. Half-swept uses solder jumpers for all the pads of the controller footprint, which does basically the same thing as flipping the controller.

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Mantis Build Guide (github.com)
 

I finally finished writing a build guide for my Mantis keyboard and taking all the pictures to make it easy to follow. Hope it helps someone ...

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Mantis v0.3.3 Update (github.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink
 

I've been busy building a few Mantis v0.3.3 builds for friends and family. It took me way longer to build these than I had planned, and I still have a few more builds to go before I work on the next version of the design. But I'm getting better at this, and very happy with how these turned out. It's nice to try out different switches. On these boards I used Choc Sunset, Pro Red and Pink switches. They all work great with the sculpted key caps.

The two keyboards in the front use clear acrylic case plates and key caps made of two different resin materials to highlight the home keys. They are translucent enough for the backlight. The one in the back is made with birch plywood plates, painted with 3 coats of shellac to bring out the wood grain and lightly sanded for a matte finish. The key caps are grey nylon. The small holes in the skirts work great for letting the backlight shine through those opaque keys.

I used KB2040 controllers from Adafruit for all these builds and loving the extra space for building the firmware with Vial support. My old v0.3 prototype with a ProMicro also works with Vial, but I had to disable some features and lighting effects to squeeze it in.

0
Mantis: Hexagonal Keys in Ergonomic Keyboards (kbd.news)
 

kbd.news is running their Advent Calendar for the second year and I'm honoured they chose my article about Mantis and hexagonal keys in ergo keyboards for opening it. Enjoy the read and have a happy holiday season ...

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Updated keycaps for Mantis v0.3 (lemmy.world)
 

I updated the 3D-printed keycaps for my Mantis v0.3 keyboard to create more sculpted keywells that require less finger movement for typing.

Thanks to the rotation of the switches on the PCB, this needs only two different keycap profiles, a flat one with 15° tilt of the dish, very similar to the keycaps I had printed for the first prototype, and a tall one with 28° tilt.

The flat keys are used on the home row, the outer pinky key and most thumb keys. The tall ones are used on the remaining keys. I'm not quite happy with the rotation of the inner index finger keys with the taller key profile. Fixing that will require a revision of the PCB, if I want to keep the number of distinct key profiles to just two.

I was able to print these keys very cost-effectively at JLCPCB, by joining 10 keys in a single 3D object. For the flat keys it brings the cost down to 30 cents per key. This leads to more imperfections than printing individual keys, but they are mostly cosmetic and don't affect the usability. The savings are worth it for me to make several prototype keyboards cost effectively.

The updated 3D models, including 10-key versions are on GitHub.