I am impressed by your work AcidFire.
Being new to the world of keyboard hacking I have a few questions regarding your keyboards.
1. Will your keyboards work with different keyboard layouts for other languages than English? Some layouts use more keys than standard US keyboards provide. Will your keyboard be easily programmable for non-English characters?
2. I usually rest my palms against a palm rest when I type. Will the edge between the thumb keyboard and the main keyboard feel uncomfortable if you rest your hands against the keyboard?
3. Regarding your 70% design. Have you considered putting an angle between the left and right keyboard part to avoid ulnar deviation?
1. Thats the plan, you'll be able to change the language on the board, and even set it depending on a layer, so you could have russian/cyrillic on one layer, and english on another.
2. It hasn't so far, but I haven't spent hours typing on it either. because of the way the top is design though, adjustments can be made easily.
3. Yup. You'll see something up about this either tomorrow or Monday.
Finally finished reading the thread. Awesome concept, I am in to buy one, er actually at least two. Definitely down for the prototype. I have a few thoughts floating around in my head after reading all of these posts so I am just going to throw them all out there, if you like any of them cool, if not I won't be hurt and want to buy some of these either way. I am an owner of many ergo keyboards including my freshly built ergodox a couple of months back as well as a programmer so let me know if I can help in any way. Ok here goes.
1. I love that you are going bluetooth. Personally I say don't sweat the ios compatibility, just put a bluetooth radio in each unit. Besides making the whole thing easier to put together I would say you would be benefitting more gamers who might want to use a single board only as a gaming board than you would be harming people wanting to hook these up to their ipads. I can't imagine that many people doing that, I rarely see anyone using a keyboard with their ipad and when I do it is either a keyboard case or an apple wireless keyboard.
2. The increased separation on the pinkie and index fingers are great. Personally I like even more curve between columns but I don't think many people would agree with me on that. As you increase the separation you actually make this more piano like. As most piano players know rsi is greatly reduced when you stop curling your fingers, but to curl less when typing you almost need a greater difference between column heights to account for finger length. Try holding your fingers straight out and see how much easier it is to move them independently than when they are curled. Makes a huge difference for me.
3. Is a custom lithium ion pack needed? Just asking, I have no idea of the power requirements but I know just having a charger with some AA eneloops in it works great for my other wireless devices. Cheap and easy, and in a pinch AA's are easy to find. I am not against a lithium ion pack though, just wondering if you save anything not needing the charging components.
4. A couple of extra keys on the bottom to allow four way movement keys truly ergonomic style would be awesome. It is the one feature I really miss when I am not using they keyboard, I never liked the Kinisis Advantage style layout as much. I am now using my ergodox daily but never could find an ideal layout that allowed me to have something similar to the truly ergonomic's:
left up/down right home pg up/pg dn end
5. Someone asked about unused keys on the ergodox. I don't use any of the furthest out thumb cluster keys, they are too hard to reach. I don't use the extra keys that would be between 6 and 7 on a regular keyboard either, I tend to miss them and hit the larger 1.5 size keys below them.
6. I think you have designed in some extra LEDs to show what layer I am on through some combination of lights. Just wanted to say, awesome. After three months of usage once every couple of weeks I still end up lost in a layer I am not sure of on my Ergodox and the quickest way to get back to good is to just unplug my keyboard and plug it back in. Can't tell you how silly I feel rebooting my keyboard to quickly get back to work.
7. I agree with some of the general concepts shown at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kurplop/9187587157/in/set-72157634289665901 My thumb doesn't move the same way as my other fingers, it wants to move down as it moves away from my palm, not on the same plane as the rest of my fingers. I guess the best way of saying that is that on the Z axis as I extend my thumb away from my hand it wants to move closer to the desk. I actually end up using my thumb to hit the inner most key on the bottom row of my ergodox that is not on the thumb cluster more than anything else except space. I use that key as my main "swap to symbols" layer when programming and have found it more comfortable to keep the thumb pretty close to my hand instead of stretching it to reach the thumb cluster.
8. If using plate mount, could the mount be somehow made small enough to fit inside of the main case instead of being a part of it. The best way I can explain this is that if you have an ergodox without palm rests and wanted to switch to a ergodox case with palm rests you could not, because the plate is doing two jobs, holding the keys in place, and two being part of the main cases structure. Makes it hard to do cool lego like switching of cases. Without that one feature you could pretty easily swap cases every few months as you saw fit. The ergodox plate hasn't stopped me from opening my switches and swapping springs, just means I can never swap cases unless I want to desolder every key.
9. Last one, I promise. Can your design accept input from the computer that would allow me to switch layers? I would loooooove to be able to write an app that would switch profiles based on what application has focus, I could automatically switch key layers/mappings based on whether vim, photoshop, chrome, or a video game had the focus. How cool would that be?
Thanks for your awesome work, now please take my money!!!
-Shane
Glad you managed to power through, and kudos for taking the time to actually read it all. To answer your questions:
1. I use my Apple wireless with it quite a bit, and only because there weren't a lot of options for affordable bluetooth ergo boards. I've also had a few people with disabilities tell me that they're looking forward to having a more comfortable board to use with their ipads & other devices. I mentioned the iOS limitation because it's the one I'm most familiar with, but I've heard that some other devices can have the same issue. I do know I should be able to slave one radio to the other, so that's the plan for now.
2. I'm looking forward to seeing what people who own the ergodox already have to say about the staggering I've done, I think you'll find it more pronounced than it looks.
3. It's not a custom pack per se, it is an off the shelf part. While things like AAs are convenient, there isn't enough space in the casing for them without making it thicker. Also, while there obviously needs to be some real world testing done, the pack I have in mind should last roughly as long as a set of AAs would.
4. TBH, that's what I had planned for that last row of keys, the set of 4 next to the 1.5. What do you currently use those keys for?
5. Again, interested to hear opinions on the thumb cluster, since the positioning was altered specifically to deal with the fact that they're unreachable on the ergodox.
6. Yup. Aside from the PWM controlled backlight, there are 5 RGB LEDs on each of the main boards, making for a total of 10 that can be programmed to do, well anything, including showing you what layer you're on.
7. I do as well, but for now the altered angle from the Ergodox is a bit of a compromise to reduce the amount of movement your thumb needs to make to strike the keys. Because of the modular design of the set up, something with a bit more of a curve could be switched to with minimal effort/cost for the end user.
8. Check back tomorrow for more details on this
9. I believe so. TBH I haven't done anything before with talking to a device set up as an HID, but from what I'm reading, this should be entirely possible. My tablet already does this and I love it, will all come down to how I can communicate with the board.
Finally little preview of what's coming tomorrow:
I spent a bit of time with the laser today, so I've got lots to show off