Ki board

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects

Ki board

Another wooden board, this time with a surprising layout: groyer418's Ki board.

KBD.news
Published June 3, 2022

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According to @groyer418, the full name of his wooden keyboard is "keyboard of ki board". If that appellation is confusing, here's a little background: "ki" means wood in Japanese so "ki board" simply refers to a wooden board.

Indeed, during prototyping, groyer tried various cutting boards (both wood and PP), and the one in the picture above is CNC machined from laminated acacia (the keycaps are made of an unidentified wood).

However, apart from the obvious material choice, there's an elephant in the room here: the mind-twisting asymmetrical physical layout.

My first thought was something like: "What the heck is this abomination?" – is this left-hand only? No. But what's going on the right side then? How? Why?!

Then it started to slowly sink in, and now I think it's brilliant. Just checked my working environment and a similar layout could actually make sense.

This illustration depicts an earlier, slightly different layout, but the concept is the same:

Pic:

Think of it this way:

Put your hands/forearms straight on your desk at shoulder width: your left hand is on the left part of the keyboard and your right hand rests on the mouse most of the time. Or it's occupied with a pen, a notebook, phone, soldering iron, whatever. So this layout makes a lot of room on your right. Then, when you have to type with both hands, the right one is put in front of you at an angle.

Because the right hand plays a relatively subordinated role here, there are no right thumb keys either.

I do think this approach has some potential (depending on your workflow). You might say a split keyboard would do the same, but if you insist on a monoblock design, a common unibody split wouldn't exploit all the opportunities: to have e.g. the mouse and right half of the keyboard on the same arc (with the pivot being your elbow), the right half should be considerably lowered imo.

透明のアクリルしかなかったから
マジック塗装できたない
アルミを加工できるのが理想だけど、
アクリルにアクリルはめて２色にしたり色々できそう pic.twitter.com/o7IUu8ZU4A
— groyer418 (@groyer418) April 16, 2022

With regards to manufacturing, because of the size of the tooling, the difficulty of cutting corners with drill bits, and the tolerances of working with wood in general, groyer experimented with CNCed acrylic and aluminum insets, and later used resin to accommodate the switches.

The resin was primarily used to increase the strength of the design, but adding some phosphorescent powder to the mix increases the coolness factor as well.

Pic: