Personal Ergonomics, typing habits and switch selection - wall of text time!Prior to teardown, I spent some time evaluating how my hand fit the keywells, and what keys were easily reachable.
I do partial touch typing only , and my pinky and ring fingers are most effective when only deviating +/- 1 from the home row.
The single hand keyboard is not designed to be used in pairs, and allocates 16 keys to the pinky and 8 to the ring finger, so my typing habits are at odds with the philosophy of use of the design. I intend to circumvent the issue by allocating rarely used keys to these locations.
My choice of large keyboard size allows me to create a layout that minimizes the use of modifiers. And by having large keywells for the thumbs, I again cater to my lazy pinky preference. I hope it works out.
Anyways.
KLE does not seem to have enough horizontal space for recreating the full keyboard, so I'll be focusing on the keywells for the time being.
I have assigned a reachability metric to each key according to how easily I could do a keypress with my hand resting on the palm rest. 1 is great and 5 is impossible.
This was with maltron keycaps installed, which are very similar to SP's DSA profile. As the keyset will primarily be DSA, my metric should hopefully still represent how my hand fits the finished keyboard. I will also have access to SA and XDA keys for some characters, so I hope some of the hard-to-reach upper corners will get fixed, at least partially.
Next are switch selections and placement. I have chosen to use Zilent tactile switches from Zeal PC for alphanumerics and symbols (blue hues). 78g, 67g and 62g weights, with the heaviest used for important thumb keys and most of the home row. Mr pinky gets special treatment, though. Alphas and index finger symbols + nav keys get medium weights, while the remaining get off easy.
In order to differentiate these keys from the remaining utility keys, I have chosen linear silent reds (shown in red, duh) for the remainder.
Thus the character keys get tactile feedback while utility keys do not. Strong fingers also get heavier switches than weak fingers, and hard to reach spots get lighter switches than easy to reach spots.
Hopefully the above graphic makes sense to other people than me.
Layout thoughts:
As an academic, I both write a lot, and also dabble in mathematical programming. I need easy access to letters and programming symbols.
I would rather avoid endless modifier combos, so a large keyboard size helps.
The alphanumeric layout is basically nordic qwerty, but with the E transplanted to the left thumb.
The frequently used symbols are clustered within easy reach of the middle and index fingers, as per my preference.
The nav keys are placed in two mirrored inverted Ts. The arrow keys are surrounded by "safe" utility keys to minimize frustration if mistypes occur.
This is my first draft. As I have yet to decide whether to wire up each half as an independent keyboard or to connect the matrix rows in each half using a cable, some of the layer issues may force several changes related to layer sensitive keys. But I am pretty happy about layout of the non-utility keys.
Stay tuned!
-T14
