So this is the Atreus, my first attempt at a keyboard design. I've been using the Ergodox for a few months now and love it to death, but I do a lot of working from coffee shops and such where it's cumbersome, and the Ergodox isn't great for typing on the couch. So I thought I'd give a shot at a lighter, more travel-friendly design after starting to play around with laser cutting and learning how approachable it can be.
As this is intended to be complementary to the Ergodox, I went with a single-piece design instead of two split-hand pieces. The keys for each hand are rotated a bit like the MS Natural, but with a columnar staggering approach, because the Ergodox has taught me to hate staggered rows with a passion. The staggering is slightly more pronounced than what the Ergodox uses, (I have big hands) but the column spacing is the same.
To further reduce the size I moved the digits to the fn layer, which might turn out to be super annoying in practice, but I'm willing to experiment and see how it works for me. This design puts a lot more keys under the thumbs like the Ergodox, (huge space bars are silly) but it doesn't have a physically separate cluster for the thumbs.
Anyway, once my shipment of switches arrives I'll be off to the local hack space to cut the case and start wiring the matrix. But I'm interested in review and comments on the design. Right now the case is just three acrylic layers, but I might add another on top of the plate to make it thicker. I've only done small-scale laser cutting before, so I'm probably making a bunch of newbie mistakes, but I'm prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate quickly. I'm going to do my best to document every step so others can follow along if it turns out to be a decent design.
More details and files are on GitHub:
https://github.com/technomancy/atreus