Hello folks!
I joined about a month ago so I'm not brand new but I wanted to take a minute to say hi.
Hi.
How it all started
A few months back I was playing a game called Flip-It with my girlfriend. It's a puzzle game similar to Othello. The object is to flip over all the pieces in as few moves, and with as few pieces, as possible. We got stuck on one of the puzzles. Very stuck. I refused to look at the solution on the back of the card and moving on to the next card with this one unsolved wasn't going to happen. My girlfriend didn't have trouble letting it go but I lost sleep for a couple nights before resolving to write a program that could solve it.
Believe me when I say that I spent an entire weekend on the program. Half of that time was coming up with an algorithm that would solve any of the Flip-It cards and the other half was spent coding it into a nice little web app that outputs the optimal solution's move sequence. Success! (and sleep) I had been overlooking a simple but clever little pattern to finish the last piece.
What's that got to do with keyboards?
I shared the program with a friend and fellow coder who I thought would appreciate it. Apparently the algorithm I created has a name, recursive backtracking, and it's often used for Sudoku solvers and such. Anyway my buddy was telling me how he started touch typing after seeing how much more efficient some of his peers were. I wondered how much faster the little Flip-It project would have been completed if I didn't have to look down to type less common punctuation and numbers.
I already new about Dvorak and figured if I was about to start from the beginning teaching myself touch typing there is not going to be a better time to become a dvork. I'm a math/stats student and this semester none of my classes require much, if any, typing. Well it's a darn good thing because those first couple weeks were pretty rough. Somewhere along the way while I was doing online typing lessons I stumbled upon Kinesis, Truly Ergonomic, and the Ergodox.
I almost bought an Ergodox.
In fact I probably would have if it weren't in between 'drops'. I have never owned or even used a mechanical keyboard bit have been excited to switch to them (pun intended) after reading up a bit. Learning to solder, use Inkscape, program a microcontroller, and design my own layout were enough reasons for me to dive in head first and make my own keyboard. And I am.
I've researched just about every detail and come up with a design I love. Last night I did a test cut with the laser cutter at school trying different sizes of holes for switches and bolts. Soldering equipment, keycaps, and diodes are in the mail. I've already received my switches and teensy. Now I just need to tweak a few things after learning from first cut and practice soldering. Then the it will be time to assemble. I'm excited.
This forum has been invaluable.
I'm looking forward to sharing my final result. Thank you geekhack community.
