Curved Split Keyboard Prototype

[Zekromtor]

The thing that could have been pretty, had I wired it nicely.
Yep, that's felt covering the key caps. Don't knock it til you try it.


The layout. All numbers on left hand = good for coding.


I tried a lot of curves/steps.


Ultimately I'm not incredibly pleased by this design. The angles of the bottom two rows didn't work for me and I'm back on my split kinesis. It's a decent want to make a curved board if that's what you're after though. I'm going to try something a bit different for the next one.

[kurplop]

That is a pretty clever way to make a curved board. Is it for prototyping only or does it have the rigidity to be permanent?

What have you learned about the design that you would change and what do you like?

[Zekromtor]

It's .220" acrylic and plenty rigid. What I liked most was having access to so many keys, but I'm just not hitting the bottom keys at the right angle to make it work. It could potentially be solved with modifications to the angle of the palm rest though. I'm just gong to have to test a flatter design with a stepped rows and very short buttons to see if the better way to achieve fitting more keys vertically isn't just from shrinking the height of the buttons (sound familiar?)

One of the things I things I was expecting to love but am not sold on yet was the alps switches. Having the activation point so high on the press may be an issue for me since I seem to like to do the quick double press without letting the key return to full height. I'm going to have to eat a lot of crow if I end up going back to cherry switches, but I will be very honest with my final assessment after I've given myself a chance to adjust to it.

I'm also going to have to look into machining my own PCBs. Lining up all those diodes by hand was very time consuming. The soldering is the easy part.