Throwing an idea out there

[NewMountain]

Hi all,

I am a long-time mechanical keyboard enthusiast and someone who has started to get into custom keyboards. I own and love my Pok3r and after getting an Ergo-Dox EZ, I fell in love with the customizability, but not the overall design. I liked the pok3r layout much better and I found the keyboard based mouse to be an awesome idea, but unsatisfying in every day use.

I have had an idea kicking around in my head for a while and now I wanted to ask the room for thoughts, leads, and things to read into further. My idea is to split a 60% keyboard and tent it allowing a joystick on the thumb for each side . In my mind, this would be a mashup of the two projects and integrate the joysticks for a much more enjoyable mousing experience. Left joystick for switching layers (N/E/S/W for four layers or N/NE/E/SE/S/SW/W/NW for eight layers) right joystick would serve as a traditional mouse cursor.

I have experience programming the QMK firmware on my ergodox keymap, have read through numerous articles on wiring and making keyboards using the teensy, but am a bit more intimidated by splitting boards, IO expansion, and not sure where to read up on the joystick integration.

Any thoughts, links and experiences would be greatly appreciated. If this is at all possible, it is something I definitely want to do and would be happy to post and share as I go.

[suicidal_orange]

Welcome to GH, this sounds like a fun project

Are you going for a true split board (two separate cases) or a fixed-split one piece?

The problem with joysticks is they are analog not digital - if they were digital you could wire them up as if they were standard key switches, but to read an analog you need to compare the value returned to decide when the direction is actually chosen and you need an analog pin for each axis to do this.  The easiest way to do a two piece is to copy the ergodox matrix and use it's firmware as a starting point, but the I/O expander is digital only so you'd need more wires between the halves for the joystick.

It might be easier to wire the joystick 'mouse' to a second controller and add a USB hub, assuming you're not going for full backlighting to hit any power limits...

[duynguyenle]

Already been done I think: https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

Although that board is not compatible with standard key spacings. So these are the things you could improve from the UHK. They do have a pretty slick imprementation for the mouse/trackpoint modules though