Katy keyboard (or K80CS (Key80 Contoured Split))

[vvp]

My niece has it so that she can decide whether she wants it.
She would want it but it uses blue switches and she is not decided she can withstand the noise
If nobody from my family wants it then it will be for sale for the price of parts and shipping.

[Heliobb]

Good to know. 

[vvp]

I have a kind of auction for Katy v0.6. The minimum acceptable price is 100€ plus shipping. It would ship from Slovakia.
Notice this is a version v0.6 and not the latest v0.7.
The most important differences are:

• v0.6 uses ATMega32u4 and not the more powerful ATXMega128a4u
• v0.6 does not have LEDs and a photo-sensor; it has only the LCD
• there are some differences in the keywell shape, especially the pinkie keys are significantly harder to reach on v0.6 (but still much better than a flat keyboard)
• it uses unmodified Cherry MX Blue switches; the switch noise is the main reason my niece did not keep it; it is possible to pry them out by cutting through the glue location with a scalpel first but it is not an easy job

If you need an option to receive the money back (if something would go wrong) then you must be able to receive a SEPA transfer. The only payment method is a transfer to a bank account. If you are in the SEPA area then it is also the most cheapest and safest way, even cheaper than paypall or credit card. The only other option I can imagine is that you would buy a lot of licenses of the STL model for Katy v0.7 and based on that I would send the v0.7 keyboard for free.
Send me a PM with your proposal if you are interested. The "auction" is closing in the middle of January if I have at least one valid proposal at that time.

A bit more information is here. And some v0.6 info.

Edit: This was sold in January 2016.

[coniurare]

Hi,

have you thought about making a kickstarter/indigogo/whatever when you reach version 1.0? Looking at keyboard.io's succesfull campaign I could see this happening with Katy too (but maybe I have pink glasses on because I like Katy so much, hehe).

[vvp]

Maybe yes, but probably not. The interest seems to be low and preparing a kickstarter is a lot of work. Therefore it is not likely to happen till I have other profitable stuff to do.

I'm thinking about doing v0.8 though. Just for fun. Mostly as an experiment with adding palm buttons and possibly track point or maybe even back light with full brightness control for each key. But if it happens at all then it will not be sooner than in about a year. If I do something important I'll post here too. But I post more often about this project at deskthority.

[vvp]

Well, I made v0.8 of Katy keyboard as an experiment with palm buttons.
Summary is: I do not think that a palm button is better than a well placed thumb button. It is about the same. But I use them and a friend liked them a lot. If you would like to try thumb buttons it is probably worth a it and here is one example how to place them:

If you would like to learn more about this experiment then you can check out the deskthority thread: https://deskthority.net/post356867.html#p356867

[hoggy]

That, is a serious chunk of progress.  Looking very solid!

[sinusoid]

Thanks for the heads up here on GH. Deskthority seems to be overridden by that model M remodel and teensy alternative for keyboards threads these days, so I barely follow, and K80 is very much up my alley. Would have gotten lost in the feed.

I like what you did with the 3d model licensing fee, did you research this from the legislative side? Can you share results? I'm interested in that, since OSHW license sadly doesn't guarantee any protection whatsoever. There's no good MIT/GPL licensing model for hardware I know of, with law rabidly favoring venture-backed startups and corporations cancer.

[dantan]

I wish the OP could offer this as a massdrop buyable thing... it's so awesome and I have no doubt even when making just 1, the costs are much lower than Maltron.

[vvp]

@hoggy: Thanks. it works well. I'm satisfied for now.

@sinusoid: Yeah, deskthority is mostly about antiques stuff. Geekhack feels like mostly about artisans. I guess that is what most people are interested in

As for as the license. I did not check with layers. Anyways, I do not think it is a big deal for this project since the model (as it is designed now) is not directly usable for injection molding. It is optimized for FDM 3dPrinting so that reprap owners can pull it off. Anybody who would want to build this in bulk needs injection molding and therefore also the model redesign. And it is questionable how much a copyright can apply for a redesigned model of the case. I guess that to protect it properly it would need a design patent ... and I do not have high opinion about patents ... as well as about copyright terms longer than 20 years. But I do not contribute money to politicians and therefore I do not have any say in this
I would select some better license if I would know any better about 3 years ago when me and kko decided about this.

@dantan: You can built K84CS for about $100 if you have all the tools available for free and at least about 65 hours of time. But only few people satisfy the "if". Most people interested in contoured keyboards do not have access to 3dPrinter and something which can load firmware or boot loader on ATxmega. Not even mentioning the time. But I guess almost everybody here who is considering to built his own keyboard has some soldering tools.
The 3dPrinter access problem cannot be fixed easily.
The currently used ATxmega controller can be replaced with something using an existing breakout board (e.g. the Elf board people are trying to develop on deskthority) or a bare controller which comes with a boot loader preloaded. Firmware needs to be modified to use the new controller. Not hard to do, but it is a work for a few weeks and I selected controller to which the firmware port was most easy to do (it took kko only a day to port the firmware from ATmega to ATxmega). Proper keyboard shape got priority before the electronics accessibility.

[vvp]

Hmmm, if there ever will be a version with the force feedback keys instead of a trackpoint then it will almost for sure come with a different controller. ATxmega is probably too slow to control the forces in the switch to properly emulate e.g. Cherry MX Brown in the normal keyboard mode.

[sinusoid]

@vvp,
re: deskthority, yeah, I think this section of GH gets as close to weird DIY HID hackery as sanely possible.
There might be something on reddit, though I haven't been looking very deeply.

re:patents, aaargh, don't get me started.
It's one huge sh!t pit that disfavours individuals creators and originality, and openhardware is virtually non-existent. Bleh.


If you're looking for a controller, STM released some nice Cortex-based boards called Nucleo:
http://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32-mcu-nucleo.html
Got a heads up on these from a friend recently, they're quite the little beasts.

Awesome idea about the force feedback buttons, really curious how that will feel in use over time. Are you gonna design the switches for that, or use existing ones?
I wanted to fiddle with thin foil tensometers a bit, getting a trackpoint that's optimized for awesome rather than low manufacturing cost.
Btw, did you see Keynav? It makes a lot of sense with horizontal staggered designs.

[vvp]

Yes, that small nucleo boards look usable. Thanks. Anyway, alternative controller selection is far-far away ... if ever.

Force feedback switches. I would love to use some on-the-shelf solution but I do not know about any.

Keynav is interesting. I will need to try it to see whether it is usable for me. My use case would be worse than the one presented in the video since I do not use mouse to focus different windows. Tilling window managers (e.g. i3) have this solved much better than trying to do it with Keynav. When I use mouse movement keys(*) on K84CS then it is mostly to hit some stupid tiny button in a web application. These are the cases when vimperator's F hotkey does not work ... grrr.

@dantan:
I realized that I was lying about the minimum price one can built K84CS now. 7bit stopped to provide the cheap keycaps which were available in the range of 0.05 € to 0.2 € per piece. The cheapest ones he provides cost $0.5 now. Makes sense. It is probably not worth to sort them for 0.1 € per piece. So the current minimum price is probably around 130 €. But other prices may have changed too. On the other side one can 3dPrint keycaps for a material price of about 0.06€ per keycap. But the time spent post-processing them is an unacceptable pain.

[vvp]

The K80CS STL files can be downloaded for free here under CC BY-SA license.
Some electronics info is here.
The firmware source code is in on github.

[Rayndalf]

This is really neat. What program did you use for modelling it? I recently attempted to model contoured hand clusters in Autodesk Inventor and found it to be quite challenging. Ultimately I gave up and made a quick and dirty curved plate design (a column too narrow and with no thumbclusters... it was rough) but feel like I have some unfinished business.

[vvp]

It started with FreeCAD and later moved on to Cubify Design due to bugs in OpenCascade (backend used by FreeCAD).

Cubify Design is not sold any more, it "evolved" into Atom3D. I used quotes because Atom3D removed some features from Cubify (e.g. direct editing, boolean operations) and added only one interesting feature: export to STEP. Cubify can export only to STL.
Both Cubify and Atom3D are cut down versions of Alibre. Atom3D costs about $200. Alibre Design Professional costs about $1000.

There is also free Dactyl and its clones created using open source OpenSCAD (OpenSCAD code possibly generated by something else).