THE ERGOPIKKU KEYBOARD
This is a keyboard design and layout that I have been working on for some "spare" time now, and it finally came to fruition last week! J Firstly I have to say a big thank you to many people in this forum Dox, PrinsValium, Lowpoly, hasu, TheProfosist, litster, ishtob and many others. None of you have ever heard of me, but I’ve been reading/stalking your posts on other modifactured keyboards for the past couple of months and they have been extremely helpful! Thank you!
So, now to the KEYBOARD DESIGN
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As you can see, it’s not your normal keyboard design. I would like to think of it as an optimized compacted ergonomic keyboard, if that’s not too bold. No doubt one of the first things you see when you look at the picture is the whole Shift, Enter, Space-Backspace area, IMO the spacebar doesn't need to be sooooo long, I mean, it’s not as if it takes the power of 2 thumbs to press it down! So I split it in half and placed the second most used non-alphabetical key “shift” on the other side. When I split the rows symmetrically I realized that there would be a gap in the fourth row, one-key’s size in width, which was perfect for the Enter key. Sometime later I found out that it was possible to map backspace onto the spacebar when in shift-state, and there you have it, the SES-B was born.
Without the Shift and Enter keys in their original position, the right side of the board “lost a bit of weight”, so this allowed me to place full size arrow keys, which, I would like to think on a compact board is a bit of a bonus. J It’s also a nice place to map Home, End, Page up and Page down, in one of the Fn layers.
Other noteworthy points would be the position of the Alt Gr key. I placed it here so that foreign letters would be easier to access through the use of Dead keys and such. I decided to leave the original backspace key as well, just in case if that in some programs shift + space ≠ backspace (none found so far J)
LAYOUT
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I don’t as yet have a name for this layout, I was thinking GeeTrio, but it sounds a bit like an Italian name… Anyway since I was designing a new ergonomic keyboard, I definitely didn’t want to have the very un-ergonomic Qwerty layout on it; it would be like attaching a caravan to the back of a Ferrari, so I thought I would have a go at designing my own layout, tailor made for a symmetrical design. In summary the 8 most common keys in the English language are placed in the home row and the other keys in the same columns are chosen in order to avoid/minimize same-finger-repeats. I also wanted to avoid dispersal of punctuation marked keys around the board, so I kept them all in the right hand side.
CASE & FRAME
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Made by SHAPEWAYS at a cost of 100€ It’s made from their cheapest material, which is strong and flexible. The strong part is great, but the flexibility, not so much, so as you can see I added these 3 beams to give the board a bit more rigidity, they fit VERY snuggly between the rows of cherry blues, and they have 0.2mm of clearance above the main PCB. The ends of the beams also have a protruding head which lock into the case, also can be seen a hole for the Mini USB on the teensy to connect to the cable, as well as some ledges for the PCB to rest upon, and finally a couple of wedges that the PCB slides past which help prevent the frame from lifting off. All in all I am very happy with the screwless case, which is nothing short of a miracle considering I designed it myself!
KEYSWITCHES & KEYCAPS
110 cherry blues bought from Mouser electronics, I bought 110 because this way the shipping is paid for by Mouser, and I bought them from Mouser because I hadn’t yet discovered WASD! This brings me nicely on to the Keycaps. I bought these from WASD, I ordered a whole 104 keys plus some extra 1 x 2.75 shift-sized keys which I needed. Since I only use 63 keys in total, I was left with some spare keys to doodle on J
Of course no project would be complete unless something was forgotten, and in my case it was the stabilizers D’oh!
PCB
attachment in zip file
Bought from expressPCB, it’s based on the PCB Dox designed for his keyboard, I started it from scratch, but did intend to have “DOX-type” written on the PCB as a tribute to the original design, but unfortunately I wrote it using the yellow silkscreen layer, which I now know gets left off from prototype boards! Sorry DOX.
TEENSY CONTROLLER
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No doubt a lot of you are familiar with these, I once naively thought that I would buy the elements of the teensy separately and solder them on to the main PCB myself. That was until I saw how teensy the board actually was, and how freaking impossible it would have been for me to do that!
FIRMWARE CODE
attachment in zip file
The firmware is modified from Dox's, (thank you again by the way). I mapped the keyboard layout as Qwerty, rather than my own GeeTrio layout, this is because I needed to create a .dll file to install a new layout in order to get backspace mapped onto the spacebar key and Escape mapped onto the Delete key, so when I select a keyboard from the language tab I see this.
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TYPING & FEEL
I’m very happy with everything to be honest, I’m typing on this keyboard now and everything is running smoothly, it has taken me a bit of getting used to, sometimes I forgettopressthespacebar instead of shift and my own layout is taking a bit of getting used to as well, but I have to say that I am glad that I spent the time and money on this project J Despite being made of flexible plastic instead of metal, the frame is very rigid, probably because the whole thing gets strength from the PCB underneath.
I wish that I could compare the feel of this keyboard to other mechanical ones, but this is the very first time I have ever used a mechanical keyboard! So sorry about that… I can tell you however that it feels about a million times better than a rubber dome or scissor switch keyboard, and I now understand why there is a forum devoted to high quality keyboards, you just want to type on them forever. J
Future ErgoPikku v1.5, v2, v3…
version 1.5
Since 100€ is a bit too expensive for a case, considering the plastic feels like someone dropped a bag of flour into the mold. I bought some nice 18mm thick cherry wood, which I intend to hollow out into a case, then I think I'm going to order an Aluminum frame, maybe from emachineshop, or if anyone else has any suggestions where to buy from...
version 2
The addition of a trackpoint in the gap in the middle would be my next venture, given that the spacebar is split, mapping left-click, middle-click and right-click onto the shift key, enter key and space-backspace key respectively would look lovely and symmetrical, if it would be possible... But when it comes to programming and coding I barely know my arse from my elbow, so I would definitely need some help on that front! (Maybe IBM can build me a keyboard J)
version 3
Making the whole thing wireless? I destroyed one of my Playstation 3 controllers the other day, trying to find out if it would be possible to have a rechargeable battery plus Bluetooth inside the case, my conclusion was that I probably shouldn’t have destroyed my PS3 controller L
