Nice work Who's laser cutter is that? Do you have unrestricted access?
It's the laser cutter in the Hunt Library Makerspace at NCSU. There's a small fee to use it.
Nice to see the working process. I have a few questions if you don't mind:
- how much did you spent on materials and tools???
- if you have to do another one (now that you know what to do): how many man hours would it take you???
- now that you have been using it: is there any thing you would change (more distance between hands, more or less keys, dedicated arrows, more column stagger, etc, etc)
Best regards and thanks for charing
I stopped keeping track of exactly how much I was spending because I realized it was going to be depressing. I'd say about $100 for all the keycaps and switches, $100 for all the other parts and tools, and close to $100 cutting the case. That's including several test cuts, ordering a few parts and tools I didn't need, and making a small donation to this forum. (How awesome is it not having advertisements plastered all over the place?) I guess in the end less than $25 a week for a fun new hobby isn't bad. And now I have all the tools and a bunch of extra parts for other projects.
A lot of the time I spent on this project was designing. If I already had a design and all the parts, now that I know just how to solder and modify the firmware, I could probably put it all together in a weekend. That's if I ignored my school work and girlfriend.
Most of the things I would have done differently on a future build, I just redid on this build. As far as the location of the keys, there is nothing I would change. I do have dedicated arrow keys. They are the diamond in the middle. I have changed the layouts in the firmware quite a bit. I'd realize I don't need a certain key or I do need another. My latest tweak was programming my user name and password for school stuff into a macro. I was typing them many times a day and now it's just two key presses so that's nice.
strange that no one ever wants to build a split layout board. If you are going for ergonomic might as well consider the breadth of your shoulders and split the board.
I considered building a split board. Being as how I knew
nothing about making keyboards before I started, that seemed like a good idea for a second project. I like the idea of having this keyboard for my laptop and school computers and then a split version with all the same layouts and layers for my desktop at home. I think it'd be cool to have a split keyboard but it has nothing to do with shoulder breadth. It's just as comfortable sitting with my hands in my lap as it is with them at my sides.