Just another "keyboard from scratch" project.
More of a work in progress thing right now, hope its ok. Should eventually be something interesting here :)
Basically I wanted a 'quiet' (compared to my MX blue das keyboard), portable (compared to a full sized keyboard), and minimal mechanical keyboard.
The happy hacker keyboard came close, but I couldn't justify the price and it had a lot of things that I didn't find necessary (1 million layers) as well as using Topre switches which I have no experience with.
I was inspired to find out there are similar projects, Humble Hacker Keyboard and the Crappy Keyboard.
So my solution was to spend far more money on making my own keyboard to the exact specs I want it...
Specs:
[*]Tactile cherry switches
[*]usb, 6-key rollover
[*]portable
[*]'hardware' (on the keyboard) dvorak/qwerty toggle (can actually toggle between any two layouts specified at compile time)
[*]No wasted keys or space (caps lock removed along with windows key and right modifiers, seldom used keys (delete, f-row, home, end, etc.) moved to another layer
[*]Portable
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Here is my key layout as it stands (please excuse the roughness of it...)
Black is standard (dvorak), blue is things that I have changed, and red is the second layer (at this point).
Nothing too exciting... Just all the features I want (or could ever want) in a compact form factor.
Here are my gorgeous keycaps (only the relevant ones of course, this is basically the look of my keyboard but with the spacing off )
The recipe so far:
[*]Cherry MX clears
[*]Ducky blank keycaps (PBT)
[*]Teensy 2.0 ++ microcontroller
[*]Custom PCB (printed by ExpressPCB)
[*]A lot of time well spent
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Things still to solve:
[*]design of the PCB board
[*]Write the firmware (already have my teensy and have started, but haven't finalized pcb yet so can only get so far)
[*]figure out what I'm going to do for a case (rubber, wood, build-into-desk, etc.)
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I have started work on the PCB, but it is a lot of slow and manual work to get all the keys into the right position with the correct alignment, spacing, etc.