I just figured I'd share this as it is something that I have wanted to try out for a while. I have used an ergodox for a few years and I really like using thumb keys for modifiers. I only use the bottom three keys of the ergodox thumb row, but I did find that by reversing the key on the bottom row it was also usable by the thumb. (By this I mean the keys two steps below the first finger home position of each hand.) This gives me four keys for each thumb that I find pretty easy to reach and I've grown very used to having them. Several months ago I bought a 3D printer and at some point it dawned on me that I could make a keyboard. I found the dactyl project but didn't like the thumb arrangement so eventually designed my own in Fusion 360. I wrote some scripts to generate the key placements and then did the other modeling to come up with a case. There were quite a few iterations of this until I found something that fit my hand well. This was actually several months ago and I got sidetracked with some issues with my printer and waiting for parts. It is far from a finished product but I was finally able to print it and put it together which is what you see here.
This was my first hand-wired keyboard and it took quite a bit longer than I expected to put everything together. I still haven't figured out where I would want to mount the teensy, nor have I managed to get the I/O expander to work, but for now I can type on it to get a feel for the layout. One of the things that I initially thought I really wanted was the extra row for the function keys. This left me with a 6x6 matrix for each hand which I thought was convenient. Having started to use it I don't think the extra row is as useful as I expected. I'm also finding that the curved layout takes a lot of getting used to and a wrist pad is an absolute must because of the overall height of the keyboard. So I'm currently on the fence as to whether or not I want to keep refining the design or just stick with a standard flat layout.
