Keyboard Builders' Digest
Save 5% at Divinikey! Code: KBDNEWS
Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects

Birdie6 keyboard

u/josandi used MrZealot's ergogen to design this beautiful Birdie6 keyboard.

KBD.news
Published February 4, 2022
Would you like to contribute to this year's MK Advent Calendar? Here are the guidelines for authors, along with last year's edition for reference.

I don't know about you but I personally find this keyboard achingly beautiful.

Maybe it's the combination of the warm wooden plate with the DES profile caps in butter yellow color – with a similarly heartwrenching price tag. But more about this later.

Inspired by the Absolem, Kyria, A.Dux, Balbuzard and many other brilliant keyboards, josandi aka choochuwu designed this 36-key, MX only, hotswap only unibody angled keyboard to be used with Pro Micro compatible development boards.

My approximation of what humans might find ergonomic – choochuwu.

The halves are rotated 40° resulting in a 80° angle between them – which is on the extreme side of similar monoblock designs. However, the usability depends on the user's working environment so this might work well in certain cases. And if somebody uses MrZealot's Ergogen to design a keyboard, that's usually a good indication of conscious planning.

All the necessary files, including Ergogen config, are published in this repo:

Github repo: https://github.com/choochuwu/BirdieBoards/tree/brid/Birdie6

The board is designed to be used with a sandwich style case, the required files are included in the repository.

DES keycaps

Profile-wise, DES is something along the SA, MT3, MDA line and they are Pseudoku3's made-to-order cold cast porcelain/resin caps with MX stem. And a quite hefty price tag:

https://asymplex.bigcartel.com/product/des-alpha-sets

According to this page, 46 keys for my Azimuth would cost exactly 200 bucks. Plus shipping, custom fees, VAT. Ouch. Nevertheless, josandi seems to be most pleased with them:

These are resin cast but feel better than anything I’ve used before. It’s some kind of porcelain resin and it seriously feels premium. The profile itself really hugs your fingers in the right way – josandi.
Do you like this post? Share, donate, subscribe, tip me off!

Published on Fri 4th Feb 2022. Featured in KBD #64 (source).


Related

Saturn

Joshua Chung's Saturn is a pretty sick monoblock split PCB with chunky hotswap controllers via DB25 parallel connectors.

42Azalia

AsherKeats' 42Azalia is a monoblock angled ortho created by a PCB generator.

Testamatta #011

Nakamura Hideki announced the testamatta #011, a nice low-pro unibody angled split keyboard.

Chocofly 3.0

Vitaly Volkov released version 3 of his 60-key low-pro monoblock keyboard, the Chocofly.

Trio

A modular keyboard prototype for full VIK experience: Trio by zzeneg.

Fiðrildi

Fiðrildi is a monoblock angled keyboard from Rivendell – designed by u/ButteredBread5255.

×
top