ErgoMechKeyboards

GitHub: https://yal-tools.github.io/ergo-keyboards/

It is not as big as some existing collections, however:

• I have filled out a bunch of metadata for the keyboards, such as switch profile and spacing, number/types of encoders, and information about the common and less-common input devices
• By limiting this to column-staggered and ortholinear keyboards only, it is possible to do a few more useful things, such as filtering based on column/row count (as if key count means much on smaller keyboards), key clusters, pinky stagger, or splay.
• Apart of filtering, you can sort the keyboards, toggle visibility of columns (to only see what you care about), and generally sift through keyboards pretty quickly.

A few more pictures:

Finding yourself some little keyboards with Choc/GLP switches

Taking a peek at the rarer 7+ column keyboards

Submitting a new keyboard

All in all, I hope that this will make it easier to answer "is there a keyboard that does X" type of questions

Hello!

I've been scratching a design for my new keyboard and wanted to try something fun. It's gonna be a 34-key unibody split, but I thought it would be cool to use the space in the middle for something fun. Many parts like cirque touchpads, roller encoders and such are hard to obtain in my area, so I didn't bother. Then I found a post by LazaroFilm with a small smartwatch LCD made by WaveShare and thought it would be a fun idea. I browsed their catalogue and noticed that none of the models are ideal for the job. The RP2040 touch LCD lacks GPIO and mounting points, the RP2040 LCD is pretty cool, but not having touch support is a bummer. Finally I thought that maybe it's better to go with a separate controller like a pico, and an 1.28" Round Touch LCD. It has touch support (duh) and 4 mounting screw posts. Pretty good. My only issue is the 13 pin JST connector used to hook it up to an MCU. It's gonna be a PCB design, no hand wiring, so I don't want a mess of cables dangling around. If only I was able to hook up a goldpin connector, or something, it would come together pretty clean. I was toying around with an idea of designing an adapter board, but there's not much room to play with and the pins are pretty tightly spaced (1.25mm). Also, it would be really great to come up with something that can be easily done without special equipment. All I have is a soldering station. No hot air, no nothing. I'd love to be able to design something that anyone can make at their desk.

I'd be grateful for any clever ideas. Thanks in advance! Cheers!

• 34 keys, wired ortholinear unibody
• WeAct Pi Pico
• Choc Silvers (hotswap)
• Chicago Steno (all R3) in black resin
• simple 3dp tray case (friction fit at the moment)

This board is helping me fall back in love with chocs. Going to iterate on the design a bit (want to try wireless, PCB solder nuts, tweaks to the case, etc). Shoutout to the friendly folks on the ergogen server for helping with some firmware questions and build troubleshooting. I tried to get a little too cute with the matrix, trying to save pins even though I was nowhere close to running out. But in the end, works like a charm.

Did my very first custom keyboard. Thank you @[email protected] for the amazing project. Question for folks familiar with QMK, when I used encoder (rotate it) it switches to the default(0) layer even if I keep holding the layer switch key. Any way around it? Here is the code if anyone is curious.

• Caps - https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0BJD22SHD?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
• Switches - https://unikeyboards.com/products/gateron-g-pro-3-0-brown-switch-factory-lubed-edition-10pcs

October is a special month for us, 3 years ago we started this journey with a small Facebook post on a local community, 3 years later we have shipped hundreds of orders along with launching several unique products.

We’d like to share our joy with a special discount, 15% discount will be automatically applied for all orders. If you’re order is $350 or more, free shipping is available.

Please head out to https://ergomech.store to see if anything catch your eyes.

And one more things. We have some old stock of the enclosed case for the lily58 and we'd like to clear these stock, so another $30 off for all lily58 with enclosed case is applied as well.

• Dactyl Manuform 5x6 full with trackball.
• Resin case, Amoeba King PCBs, and hot swaps.
• Used Kailh Box Navy switches.
• Adafruit KB2040 and PMW3389 for the controllers.
• TRRS with full duplex between the halves.

Took my sweet time wiring up to not burn myself out, but I think it was worth the wait! My soldering skills certainly improved by the end of it. 😅

Also, big shout-out to Wylderbuilds!

OK, here there are:

• I have an ergogen mounting hole footprint with a 2.2mm diameter. The metric screw clearance chart I found describes 2.2 as "close": what does that mean? What I want is the screw to come through freely (without having to turn it).
• But for the bottom plate, I would like the screw to be held in place without additional nuts (to minimize height). Can I just make the hole a bit smaller and hope I can screw the screw in?
• Are the splitKB m2 screws flat enough to be placed between choc keys (with MBK keycaps)?

WeAct CH552T board, running FAK

How's my handwiring? 😅

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.

Basically title.

Because I live in Paris, it would be nice to buy batteries in store. The most promising model I found is a 180mAh 32x17x4mm lipo.

I could also theoretically use one of these li-ion cylindrical batteries, but they are longer than the keyboard's size (which is 77mm).

Here's what I already tried:

• removing the inner thumb key, which makes the keyboard 34-key and leaves enough space for the battery mentioned above. Though after a few hours of using home row mods on my current keyboard I don't think that will be a good solution.
• moving the MCU (Seeed XIAO BLE) to the right, which makes the board 2cm wider (and doesn't look very good since I have no keys there). This one isn't very elegant, plus I don't really want to make the board wider, and I'd like to avoid it even though it is a solution.

Please ignore the mounting holes and TRRS jacks, I am still unsure about whether or not I want to just ditch bluetooth and make this board wired (which works with kmk)

The ergogen config is available on the github repo.

I wanted to show off an ergonomic keyboard generator I've been working on for several months. You can find more information about it here: https://ryanis.cool/cosmos. If you've used my dactyl generator may have already seen it, but for those who aren't familiar, I'm building Cosmos with the goal of making it easier to design and build curved ergonomic keyboards.

I'm really excited to see what new designs the tool opens up. The tech behind past generators hasn't been flexible enough for designing new thumb clusters, but the layout engine in Cosmos is flexible enough to let you just drag keys where you want them. I've already seen some innovative designs result from this. There's a ton of other cool stuff here, and most of it is free to use & in the process of being open-sourced.

It's still under heavy development and I push breaking changes from time to time, so to be notified of what's about to break and get help with bugs I highly highly recommend you join the Discord if you're interested in using the tool. I've been keeping the link to the beta behind the Discord to incentive you to join, but if you're morally opposed to Discord, here's a direct link to the beta. And the landing page again with more info: https://ryanis.cool/cosmos.

P.S. Right now it's limited to only generating things that look like Dactyl Manuforms, but here's a preview of one of the features I'm working on. There are more designs coming :)

There's only two days left to our WHATEVER sale!

Get 10% off any order of $100 or more with check-out code YEAH_WHATEVER_MAN.

Also! We now support full trackball support, even dual trackballs, with our Bluetooth wireless builds.

In other news, for our wired-only builds, we now support PER-KEY RGB!

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

3D-Printed Dactyl Manuform Cases: https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/dactyl-manuform-resin-print https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/made-to-order-dactyl-manuform-cases

3D-Printed Miryoku Keycap Sets: https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/keycaps

Dactyl Manuform Build Kits: https://wylderbuilds.com/shop/p/manuform-diy-kit

Keep typing like a God!

Andy @ Wylderbuilds

The chair’s cover has a zipper underneath, and it just occurred to me I could stick magnets in the arms, under the fabric, so my keyboard can attach to the chair. 🎉

And with the AR glasses I can just recline and putter away on the three virtual monitors on my ceiling. 😎

Hi All,

Here's ht latest update to the Rolio split keyboard. It's now almost done, it just needs some minor cosmetic and manufacturability tweaks.

The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/MickiusMousius/RolioKeyboard

A quick run down on the features (so far):

• The keyboard itself
  • Fully wireless thanks to the Nice!Nano controllers and awesome ZMK firmware
  • Excellent battery life, I've personally been getting 2+ weeks before it gets to 60% with the previous iteration.
  • A low profile, compact choc spaced form factor that is similar to the Corne
  • Additional "Sometimes" buttons on the bottom row just like the Sofle
  • Horizontal roller encoders on both halves
  • A backlight that is efficient enough to be used on battery
  • A robust chassis so that it can be treated like a normal keyboard
  • An FDM version for at home low cost production
  • A CNC option for a slick look and very premium feel
  • A travel case that can easily be made using any FDM printer
• ZMK Keymap & Custom keycaps:
  • The keycaps are fully customized and match the ZMK keymap thanks to FKCaps
  • MacOS and Windows modes as part of the keymap to keep the "same" handy macros in both OSs
  • All of the symbols and special behaviors can be accessed using at most two keys
  • The settings keys and different modes are documented in the key caps themselves (easy to learn).
  • The keymap can be easily customized thanks to ZMK, the keycaps can also be customized to suit your needs

I'm doing dactyl manuform first time (also my first ergo. keebs). Buying parts, soldering, wiring matrix like instruction. When i plugged in computer and flashing firmware, it only respond D, F, Space keys

I don't know why it doesn't work like it supposed to be, i have unpluged the pro micro, plugged and flash firmware again, and the problem is still there

Can someone see what wrong with my wiring?

https://github.com/semickolon/fak

FAK is a keyboard firmware for the CH55x series of very cheap chips, with the purely functional programming power of Nickel. The project aims to make keyboards much cheaper and to make configuration more declarative and fun.

New features:

• You can now make split keyboards with FAK!
• Combos of up to 8 keys that get the same treatment as physical keys
• Media keys for playback and volume control

Most importantly, three full examples are now in the repo of varying difficulties. The beginner example demonstrates how to make a simple keyboard and keymap definition and it looks almost like JSON (but with "variables").

The intermediate and advanced examples demonstrate how powerful Nickel can be. It features parameterization of keymaps and layouts, advanced home-row mods with eager decision, automatic generation of home-row mod behaviors based on their key position, and more. You can even bring your configs to a higher level of abstraction and be able to do something like this:

base_layout = "WFPBJLUYSTHKXNAIRCGDM,.O"

This, for example, defines the sequence of keys in your base layer and, since it's just a string, you can change it very easily. Somewhere along the way, this string of characters becomes kc.W, kc.F, kc.P, ... but done automatically. Abstractions like these can help make your configs more flexible and modular and they allow for code reuse across multiple keyboards and layouts (like QMK userspaces!)

I'd love to hear what you guys think! Any feedback, suggestions, and testing is appreciated! :)

Upgraded to a case with space for a battery, so now i can finally use this wirelessly :)

PCB is an edited version of MangoIV's le_chiff_ble curtosy of dreipunkteinsvier (unpublished as of now).

Case and gap-filling plate are closed-source designs by Bubbleology, who was so kind to let me get them printed 💚

Firmware: ZMK of course

Keycaps: MT3 2048 Katakana and DES thumbs printed in mjf.

Switches: lichicx lucy

Extra pics:

The really nice thing about them is that they accept 3v3 logic when being powered by 5v. Although that usually works with the WK6812, it's technically out of spec and I have read about this causing stability issues. They are also pretty low power, 12mA at max brightness (these are at 1/32).

They are reverse-mount, so you don't have to be concerned about keycaps colliding with LEDs.

Firmware is still definitely a WIP, as is the motherboard (the keyboards are i2c daughter boards as per my previous post). I have switched to embassy-rs, which is way more ergonomic than embedded-hal - async rust makes tons of sense for embedded dev. I'm also going to be printing blank shields for the RPi Picos, to hide that green a little better.

If you've been putting off designing your own keeb, I strongly recommend it. It's really rewarding.

The Mün 2 is now open source and in group buy until Oct 31st here on RGBKB

As this is a new community without many rules, please let me know if this is too much spam!

October is a special month for us, 3 years ago we started this journey with a small Facebook post on a local community, 3 years later we have shipped hundreds of orders along with launching several products.

We'd like to share our joy with a special discount, 15% discount will be automatically applied for all orders. If you're order is $350 or more, free shipping is available.

Please head out to https://ergomech.store to see if anything catch your eyes.

I know, this isn't a keyboard post, but lets be real, if there's any communities that would know/care about programable foot pedals it would be this one.

I'm looking for a USB foot pedal, ideally something clicky-feeling, with decent-resistance, short travel distance. I only need 1 pedal but something with more than one is fine. I don't need anything premium; I'm just browsing amazon I can't really spot the difference between mushy garabage and decent-ish build quality.

Any recommendations?

(Non-USB recommendations are fine; hopefully this post will be useful to others considering a foot pedal)

So I switched to a low-profile angled keyboard basically identical to this: https://www.amazon.com.au/Perixx-PERIBOARD-805-Wireless-Ergonomic-Bluetooth/dp/B08KJ8JW9Q/ref=asc_df_B08KJ8JW9Q/?tag=googleshopmob-22&linkCode=df0&hvadid=463603004336&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15645889703857693714&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9071296&hvtargid=pla-1017854421494&psc=1

It's been quite a few years now, and my RSI type issues have reduced a lot in that time, but I'm not sure it's really cutting it anymore. Starting to get wrist pains again. So I think it's time to up my keyboard game, but things get expensive going to the next level and the choices are kind of overwhelming. So I'm just hoping for some recommendations really.

I'm a programmer so that's an important factor, I don't want some weird key layout that's good for typing English but rubbish for programming. But I also don't really want to spend loads of time fully customising it. But I'm happy to learn a new layout if research or whatever supports it being better.

Well anyway, any thoughts welcome!

This is just more of me expressing some thoughts that some people might have feedback on.

I used a Kinesis Advantage for over a decade and it made me feel at one with the computer until one day I started to get right hand pain.

I gave it a break for a few years, then got a new Advantage 360 and a Glove80 to see what would work for me. Neither do, both make my right hand feel more cramped than it should. But I'm pretty happy on something like a Sofle or a Kyria, or even a basic TKL - tho still get pain after a time.

I do have cubital tunnel like symptoms but was recently tested and don't have any real nerve damage that can be fixed, so based on the advice of my neural muscular doctor and physiotherapist, I'm still in the prevention stage.

Anyone experience anything similar?

Thanks!!