ErgoMechKeyboards

Howdy folks!

After letting my dactyl manuform build flounder for awhile, while I try to figure out a good way to reduce the tedium of hand wiring, I got tired of typing on a terrible KB. So, I ordered a Kyria v3 PCB kit and have started the tedium of adding Mill-Max sockets.

Wish me Luck!

Hello folks,

TL:DR - I need help building a LP wireless corne keyboard. I described my core requirements below and I'd apprecchaniiate if you could take a look at them.

this is my first contact with the world of ergonomic keyboards and the world of mechanical keyboards in general. I have never dealt with electrical engineering or similar tinkering before either, so I neither know how to solder properly nor do I have any other technical skills. I am willing to learn tho :)

So I'm a minimalist, foss enthusiast and a constant life optimizer. I am therefore a big fan of the swiss army knife principle: multifunctionality, modularity, compact, portable and aesthetic design. If possible, I try to combine several things with a single capability into one modular, multifunctional gadget: The result is a multi-purpose device that takes up less space and is characterized by a well thought-out design.

This process just happened to me with keyboards. I have a fairly large keyboard at home and I always carry a laptop with me to university. I'm not a big fan of their fixed parts, the qwerty layout they come with, the standard switches, the huge space they take up and their overall inefficient design. The search for more freedom of use first led me to the world of mechanical keyboards, then to the 40% keyboards, which still suffered from the unergonomic staggered layout, via the olkb planck, which, I realized, has the hands too close together, and finally to the corne keyboard. And what can I say, it was love at first sight... ^^

//

So I took a closer look at this keyboard and came across many great implementations that inspired me to design my own. I'll list everything I've thought about so far:

• 6 row corne PCB (42 keys), LP (choc red)
• Boardsource Unicorne aluminum case (very minimalistic, few edges, robust and still lightweight) with magnetic back + Boardsource legacy plate
• Wireless (BLE) connectivity
• MCU: Nice!Nano/Supermini NRF52840

I'm thinking of a mix of Boardsource's Unicorne LP case, their Legacy plate and the presoldered wireless corne pcb from typeractive, similar to what this reddit user did. I will probably have to make a bigger cutout on the side to fit the reset button. Also I'd like to put some magnets on the inside of the case to make it stick like seen here. Regarding the MCUs they should be all supported by the zephyr project so I'm assuming they will work with ZMK too?

I'm not exactly sure if the pcb fits the unicorne case though, as it only has room for a usb port on the side and the wireless pcb has the power heads there. alternatively there is also the regular corne aluminum case from boardsource, which was also used in the above post, but which I personally don't find as pleasing to the eye as the unicorne one.

Now I turn to you: What do you think about it? Have I overlooked something? Are the sources I have given solid? Is it safe to shop there?

Thanks in advance! (and sorry for the long post)

Have been working my way through FlatFootFox’s Let’s Design a Keyboard with Ergogen tutorial – this is just the first iteration

• number of keys of a Corne, aesthetics of Splaytaroid, less aggressive splay than A. dux
• next big challenge is dealing with the firmware
• deciding whether I want to keep it split or go monoblock (Reviung41 or Splaytaroid)
• following iterations with work with implementing the fancy features – switch plate, bottom plate, case of some sort, RGB, OLED

I recently got a ZSA Moonlander and started learning colemak dh. It's been a really fun journey so far and I'm now able to type consistently at 60 WPM. However, as you can see from the chart I've sort of hit a plateau at 60 and I'm having trouble breaking it.

I think it's time to switch up my training strategy. So far, I've been using keybr.io and typelit which have both been great. Are there any other tools folks have used during this not-quite-beginner but not-yet-fast stage?

UPDATE 2: It was indeed the TRS cable that was the issue. I just got my TRRS cable and it is now working fine.

UPDATE: I ithink I know the problem, I'll update this post after I confirm it in a few days. This is the cable I was using

This isn't a TRRS cable this is a TRS cable and I dont have a random TRRS cable to try out. I will wait for a few days until my actual TRRS cable that I ordered reaches me.

Gotta preface this by saying this is my first ever keyboard build, and pretty much my first time soldering something involved.

But anyways, I got the left half working, even with my slightly shoddy soldering, and was feeling pretty confident. Finished off soldering the right half and checked for bridges with a multimeter and that looked fine.

I flashed the same firmware that I used on the left to the right half. And then connected them together and plugged in the usb on the left half. The left half was working as usual, but the right half didn't recognise any inputs. It showed the lily58 logo but that was all that was showing on the oled.

I disconnected the halves and connected only the right half, and all the keys were being detected as if it were the left half but mirrored to the right.

What have I done wrong?Gotta preface this by saying this is my first ever keyboard build, and pretty much my first time soldering something involved.

But anyways, I got the left half working, even with my slightly shoddy soldering, and was feeling pretty confident. Finished off soldering the right half and checked for bridges with a multimeter and that looked fine.

I flashed the same firmware that I used on the left to the right half. And then connected them together and plugged in the usb on the left half. The left half was working as usual, but the right half didn't recognise any inputs. It showed the lily58 logo but that was all that was showing on the oled.

I disconnected the halves and connected only the right half, and all the keys were being detected as if it were the left half but mirrored to the right.

What have I done wrong?

I'm using a splinky rp2040 for the MCU, I have ordered new cables but they won't arrive for a few more days, I am using an old headphone cable to connect the halves.

A few weeks ago I asked for right hand game-pad (for left handed mouse users) ideas. Thanks to @[email protected] for recommending the Eternal Keypad. The price was right so I built one up. Only a few hours of use so far, but I like the form factor a lot. Running Gateron blacks. I know my caps aren't the correct size. I'm working on locking in the layout before I order some.

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 ...

The 2x OLED displays are still a work in progress

I saw the FAK firmware that @semickolon wrote / shared here, and thought it'd be fun to try to write firmware for.

Nickel is one of these "JSON + functions" languages.

I found it pretty fun to write declarations for the keymaps. I've shared my code at https://github.com/rgoulter/fak but here are some things I thought were neat:

• Using multiline strings to declare the alphas layer (and then mapping this to keycodes) is very tidy: in ncl/layouts.ncl

• Supporting different layouts for a keyboard, e.g. ncl/keyboards/rgoulter/ch552-44/layouts.ncl, so the CH552-44 can have a split 3x5-3 keymap.

• Using tap-dance to allow for 'tap'/'home row mods' alphas, e.g. ncl/keymaps/ch552-48/default/keymap.ncl

The PCB design files (and other useful files, like plate files, 3DP case files, etc.) can be found at https://github.com/rgoulter/keyboard-labs (there's also a design which uses the CH552T directly).

Hello, I have a question before starting the soldering process, can you confirm me the diode is correctly oriented ?

Thank you !

Hey all, Wondering if its possible to keep keymap in keymap.json while using the tapdance and some other custom code for hold functions in keymap.c? Having the keymap.json makes it possible to use online configurator which makes changes very easy. I've used qmk c2json but it doesn work with all keys so just wondering if there is a way to keep using keymap.json while having custom code for tapdance etc in keymap.c Thank you

I am new to ergonomic and programmable keyboards, but something felt fun about making it as cheap as possible by doing 5 at once, and cheapinos at that. I spent quite a few hours on slimming down the cost and ended up spending roughly 35-40 bucks per board, switches and keycaps included. For this I have:

• Magnetic USB-C cable
• 360 rotatable RJ45 cable
• Hotswap Cheapino V2 board that hopefully works
• Spare PCB that can serve as bottom.
• Of course it has rotary encoder as well.
• ABT Green/Red Aliexpress sourced keycaps.
• Either Gateron G Pro v3.0 Silver or Tecsee Purple Panda switches (very good budget switches based on reading)

For this, how much would you realistically ask for? Either max profit or your preferred cost.

Posting this here for sake of search engines and if others are losing their mind trying to troubleshoot.

Problem: I have a USB-C Piantor, connected through a USB/thunderbolt port on a Dell XPS 13. My OS is Arch Linux, and it when plugging the keyboard in, the Piantor would show up on lsusb but not do anything. dmesg shows the following error:

device descriptor read/64, error -71.

Solution: Disable USB suspend in a root terminal:

# echo -1 >/sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend

Today's Flash Sale: Last Chance for 30% off keyboard kits

https://www.diykeyboards.com/

You can still take advantage of 25% off everything in our store, plus a different Flash Sale every day. Enjoy, and thanks for your support!

Also, rather than spam the group with promos, I will be updating here with the daily Flash Sales, so be sure to check back.

Hi All,

I've just released all of the design files for the Rolio 46.1 keyboard. They can be found on GitHub below:

https://github.com/MickiusMousius/Rolio46Keyboard

I'll be opening a store in January to sell sub-assemblies & components to make it easier for people to build their own Rolio 46.1 without needing to chase as many components.

Cheers

MickiusMousius

Here are a few more pictures too:

EDIT: Note to mods, if I need to add a vendor flair please let me know and I can re-post.

Figured I should do a Black Friday sale also. No coupon needed, sale ends December 1st.

$10 off Bad Wings Kits

$5 off Cut Slope Kits

$5 off Cut Slope PCBs

Nope, you're not seeing double. It's two identical Polydactyl builds (the Polydactyl is a big, flatter Dactyl Manuform variant.)

These two massive monsters feature:

• 87 keys total.
• White resin cases.
• Dual trackballs (scroller on left, pointer on right.)
• Dual OLEDs.
• Rotary mouse-wheel style encoder.
• NEW! Per-key RGB backlighting.
• All running QMK on Pi Pico controllers with Vial support.

They're massive! But we build all shapes and sizes with as many or as few fancy features as you'd like!

And it's that time of year!

This is our biggest sale yet, get 20% off any order of $100 or more with code WYLD_FRIDAY at wylderbuilds.com!

Full Builds https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/dactyl-manuform-build

PLA Case Prints https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/made-to-order-dactyl-manuform-cases ** Resin Case Prints** https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/dactyl-manuform-resin-print

DIY Build Kit https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/manuform-diy-kit

Cheers and keep typing like an RGB-backlit God!

Andy @ Wylderbuilds

I've taken it too far haven't I?

I just got a ZSA Moonlander and I've been... on an adventure with it. Turns out my typing technique was total garbage so I've had to essentially start re-learning how to touch type. That, plus the ortho layout, plus the other ways my layout is now changed (special chars) has made the learning curve feel steep.

Going through all this has made me wonder some things about the long-term, and so I was hoping to lean on folks with more experience for some answers.

1. Does learning to touch type on ortho (or a new layout w/ thumb clusters and such) mess with your ability to touch type on normal staggered boards? I still use my laptop when I travel and there is no shot I'll be lugging around an ergo board.

2. Is it worth going crazy with it and trying to learn workman or colemak at the same time? On some level I feel like it might not be that much harder, since it feels like I'm re-learning to touch type anyway.

3. Would it be better to start with a keyboard that's just split, but otherwise the same (Instead of ortho and alternative layout etc)? And maybe later move on to a crazier layout?

I received my Sunsets from lowprokb.ca last night and managed to install them in my ZSA Voyager today.

First impressions... these switches are LOVELY to type on. The original browns I ordered with my Voyager felt heavy, and tiring after longer sessions - not to knock on Browns, everyone has a different experience... but I am very happy with my purchase.

This is how I imagine most split keyboard users to look