Very nice. Could you describe your thought process for the design?
I’ve always used standard keyboards, and I even had the idea of having a keyboard with many extra keys, for increasing productivity. At a certain time, I saw a 60% keyboard and the explanation of why it’s helpful, especially when it comes to giving more room to the mouse. I suddenly realized that my mouse always hit the side of my keyboard and I had to pick it up and place it away; a lot. I use 3 monitors, and that makes this worse.
So, I got a 60% keyboard, and I was happy with the result. Then, I started thinking what other changes I can make. I thought it would be a good idea to try a keyboard with minimum number of keys: the extra room for the mouse is not significant, but I thought having fewer keys on the board may make it easier to locate them.
First I wanted to have 10 columns, and I started working on the key layers for a week or so. Soon I realized that having 10 columns makes it very difficult, and I chose to have 11 columns.
I wanted to build a Bluetooth keyboard, and my idea was to put the microcontroller besides the thumb keys. But it seemed like building a Bluetooth one is very difficult, and I preferred to have a wired keyboard for my first try. Because it was very difficult to put the microcontroller on one place and wire a USB connection to the top of the board (because of the imitations that I had), I decided to put the microcontroller on the top-left side of the board. Then, to balance the whole board, I cut out the part on the bottom-left side, and added that decorative whole to the bottom-right side.
When I was done with the previous steps, I built a cardboard model of it, and tried “typing” on it. Using that, I set the exact distance between the thumb keys and the others.
Then I started thinking about the building process and the way my method of building, especially the use of wood, will affect the design; e.g. the wooden elements cannot be too small where there’s going to be pressure. It was very difficult, because I wanted it to be as slim as possible. When I put it on the desk, the top of the wooden surface is only 9mm above the desk!
When I was building it, everything went well, except for the wiring: after I was done with wiring, I realized that the wires I used are too thick to fit inside the board. So, I had to desolder all of them and use a much thinner wire instead.
So, I guess that’s all
