Hey guys,
making two keyboards at the same time right now because I'm a glutton for punishment. This keyboard is going to be my at home keyboard, so it's a lot more ridiculous and a bit less professional than my work keyboard.
My first project board was an ergodox, which felt pretty awesome for the most part, but I could not get past having symbols on a separate layer. I tried a bunch of different layouts but the position of the brackets and right shift are burned into my brain, so I set it aside for a while. Luckily, a couple months later, Adereth came out with his really nice parametric ergonomic split hand keyboard:
https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-cave/. 3d printing is another hobby of mine, so I set about printing out a test piece. It's pretty neat, but I wanted to play around with an inverted thumb cluster and I needed the extended keys I mentioned earlier, so I set about modifying his code. Clojure looks pretty cool but I don't have a lot of exposure to Lisp-like languages, so I figured it would be faster if I just converted whatever I needed to regular SCAD and add the rest.
I switched to a plate design as its a little bit sturdier, which necessitated changing the row
offsets to row
insets in order to get a solid plate that didn't overlap key space. I had to design a new enclosure now that the top was all different, but the row/column code is mostly the same.
The result of that so far is this:
This was about 30 minutes away from being my final design. I'm not super happy with the thumb cluster look, but the functionality is good, and everything else is perfect. I just needed a little tray and hole cutout for the teensy on both ends and I was going to print the left half tonight (since the right half will take something like 12 hours) That is, until someone mentioned in a completely unrelated thread how cool it would be if the ergo dox had a trackball. Which sounds like... an amazing idea.
so now I have a trackball on overnight. I chose the Kensington Orbital because it's smallish:
so it will actually fit well in one of the thumb clusters, and because it was one of few that someone had a teardown picture of:
which doesn't look nearly as bad as I assumed it would look (I thought it would be soldered to the board). It seems to have its own support system as opposed to the Logitech Trackman which is preferable, and I have plenty of wire and shrink tubing at home to extend those two sets of wires, and there is plenty of space underneath the keyboard to hide the PCB, especially on the right hand version, so I think this plan is a go.
One small caveat though: I ended up looking around on geekhack and this has definitely been thought of before, but it looks like most people haven't posted results. I noticed this thread:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=55960.0 talking about adding a trackpoint to an ergodox running tmk_firmware being rather simple. looking in the source there is also a usb_mouse.c file, which is good, since the kensington is USB. I am not much of a microcontroller person, so I'd love to hear if anyone has done this before; is it possible with a trackball? can you just connect the wiring to a couple pins and redo the config and poof? That would be wonderful, I'l love to limit the amount of cables coming out of this thing as the halves are already going to be separate, but worst comes to worst I can just have three USB outs.
my next update will probably be prototyping the new thumb cluster to house the trackball while I try and figure out this whole integrated mouse issue
EDIT: almost forgot, here's an early prototype of the row layout without insets, just to make sure my 3d printer could actually handle something that required so much support: