geekhack Community > Ergonomics

Forever Ambre: a tiny keyboard based on linear hexagonal grid

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macroxue:
I like the concept, especially the layout being viewed as 0.5u column staggering and the placement of navigation keys.

Also a good reference to the α, β and γ angles. For now, my main driver has the following parameters.
α = -12°, slope, negatively tilted
β = 0°, splay angle
γ = 60° lateral inclination, high tenting
and
d = 24cm, the distance between splits, index finger to index finger at rest

My view of keyboard ergonomics is to have as many degrees of freedom as possible so the board can be customized to optimally fit to each person's physique like finger lengths, palm sizes, shoulder width etc. That said, we may face some trade-offs and remove some degrees of freedom, due to complexity and technical limits . Personally, splittability and tentability are the two most important ones I would always keep.

Good luck with the exploration. May you build a great board!

dusan:

--- Quote from: macroxue on Tue, 14 December 2021, 17:49:50 ---I like the concept, especially the layout being viewed as 0.5u column staggering and the placement of navigation keys.
--- End quote ---
Thank you. If you're referring to the navigation keycaps shown by photos (rather than nav keys shown by the keymap) then yes, I put them there because they look kind of reasonable and because I know of people who prefer dedicated navigation keys, especially the arrows. My personal preference however is navigating and editing by the left hand using a layer that is shifted to by the left thumb, and I find it pretty useful to have an identical copy of that nav&edit half-layer in the right-hand half of a right-thumb layer, as shown by the keymap.

(Background: I got very used to the standard full-sized keyboard, I do a lot of manual number entry by the right hand, I use the mouse by the left hand, and half of time of my both-hand keyboarding is spent on typing punctuation- and symbol-rich text such as code and math.)


--- Quote from: macroxue on Tue, 14 December 2021, 17:49:50 ---Also a good reference to the α, β and γ angles. For now, my main driver has the following parameters.
α = -12°, slope, negatively tilted
β = 0°, splay angle
γ = 60° lateral inclination, high tenting
and
d = 24cm, the distance between splits, index finger to index finger at rest

My view of keyboard ergonomics is to have as many degrees of freedom as possible so the board can be customized to optimally fit to each person's physique like finger lengths, palm sizes, shoulder width etc. That said, we may face some trade-offs and remove some degrees of freedom, due to complexity and technical limits . Personally, splittability and tentability are the two most important ones I would always keep.

Good luck with the exploration. May you build a great board!

--- End quote ---

Your keyboard is great, especially the range of tenting angle. I would love to see your best γ, β, α (in the order of importance/precedence/priority) as a function of d, i.e. how do they vary when d gradually grows from 0 to shoulder width. It is a lot of experiments that ought to be conducted in a systematic way and it is subjective, depends on personal physiology, I know.  But one person's data is better than no data. To my best knowledge no such research on such a widely adjustable keyboard was made public.  I believe your data would be a great contribution to the keyboard community. Certainly it's worth a separate topic.

Thank you.

macroxue:

--- Quote from: dusan on Tue, 14 December 2021, 20:37:02 ---I would love to see your best γ, β, α (in the order of importance/precedence/priority) as a function of d, i.e. how do they vary when d gradually grows from 0 to shoulder width. It is a lot of experiments that ought to be conducted in a systematic way and it is subjective, depends on personal physiology, I know.  But one person's data is better than no data. To my best knowledge no such research on such a widely adjustable keyboard was made public.  I believe your data would be a great contribution to the keyboard community. Certainly it's worth a separate topic.

--- End quote ---

It's pretty hard for me to get the correlation between γ/β/α and d accurately. Now I just can't type comfortably when d or γ (tenting) is too small. Intuitively, β (splay) should keep the fingers well-aligned with the columns. γ and α (tilt) seem to be less dependent on d. I would say α is to keep the wrists straight, as you mentioned before, and it depends on the height of the desk. Hope this helps.

dusan:

--- Quote from: macroxue on Wed, 15 December 2021, 20:35:49 ---It's pretty hard for me to get the correlation between γ/β/α and d accurately. Now I just can't type comfortably when d or γ (tenting) is too small. Intuitively, β (splay) should keep the fingers well-aligned with the columns. γ and α (tilt) seem to be less dependent on d. I would say α is to keep the wrists straight, as you mentioned before, and it depends on the height of the desk. Hope this helps.

--- End quote ---
Thank you. Definitely it helps. Thought of it, I tend to agree with you. Especially about γ. We human are less sensitive to forearm pronation than to wrist extension or ulnar deviation. If γ = 0, at d = shoulder width, pronation is 90°, and at d = minimum for a splitable keyboard (about 4u - 5u) pronation is 59° + 14° = 73°, as implied from the article in the said thread. (Where 59° is the measured pronation and 14° the actual γ of the keyboard used in the experiment.) Despite that, most people feel fine with γ = 0 at d = shoulder width and γ = 14° at d = minimum is already considered 'comfortable'.

Nevertheless, even with limited known facts, it seems reasonable to say that γ depends mostly on d (rather than on α or β). From the said article, when α changes from -8° to +8°, or when β changes from 12° to 18°, the right-forearm pronation changes by only 1.4° and 1.3°, respectively (which is small compared to 73°). And γ can only change about that much.

dusan:
In the first post, I wrote "position of the Atreus' center-most thumb key is known to be problematic. With the Forever Ambre, the problem's gone."

What is the problem, exactly? Here I offer my personal opinion, based on own experiences. Position of the key will cause pain at the wrist and/or the middle finger (the CMC5 and the PIP3 joints to be specific) in the long term.

The following annotated picture illustrates the problem and solution.



My case: the left-hand and the right-hand centermost thumb keys are assigned to LFn and RFn respectively, which are press & hold function keys (to shift to layers). LFn  + C and symmetrically, RFn + comma are assigned to Ctrl + C macro, i.e. Copy. Since I got too used to the standard keyboard and mouse under the left hand, initially I preferred the right-hand nav & edit pad (including the right-hand Copy). The left-hand nav & edit pad, which is in the same layer as the num pad, was used only in data entry tasks. However, my right-hand PIP3 joint was hit by a sharp pain right after the first day of heavy writing on the Atreus.

I stopped writing for some days and the pain's gone.  When I switched to the left-hand nav & edit pad for all but right-hand only keyboarding (which is much less intense and less professional part of my work), the pain didn't come back.

Interesting enough, the pain did not emerge to the left hand, despite using an identical copy of the right-hand nav & edit pad. Also note that the LFn + RFn + comma and LFn + RFn + C, which are mapped to slash and question mark in my Dvorak-based keymap, although used fairly frequently (I write in C/C++) and consist of the same finger movement, do not cause finger pain either.

Improving the position of the centermost thumb key was never my goal. It is simply a result of the choice of linear hexagonal grid. Again, I designed the Forever Ambre before I ever touched the Atreus and realized its problems.

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