Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Lihis
This open-source split ortho PCB by Cedutus, named after a Finnish dish, is called Lihis.
Published May 22, 2022
With his split ortho board Lihis, designer Eetu aka Cedutus takes us on a culinary journey and gives us a lesson on some basic Finnish.
I finally "learned" how to create my own PCB. Learned is in quotes because it just works, and there is like 70% chance that there is something wrong in the PCB – Cedutus.
As the Github page humbly states, Lihis is basically "a worse Helix" with a Blackpill controller.
The author likes ortholinear boards, daily drove a Planck for a long time, and even bought a Keebio Levinson, but missed hotswap. Finally, eyeing a Helix for a while got him into finishing this board.
Btw, Lihis stands for "meat pie", a popular Finnish street food, and the name might not make much sense without knowing Eetu's previous project and whence the appellation is derived:
At first I was making a split keyboard named "Makkaraperunat" which is sausage and potatoes. It's pretty popular grill food in Finland, and I was very new in making a PCB and I didn't have a reversible PCB, so I had to make each half on their own. The joke was that it's 2 parts, so the name was also 2 parts. I ordered a prototype of it, but I accidentally used a wrong footprint for the right side TRRS connector, so Makkaraperunat was pretty much unusable. After that I wanted to make a reversible PCB, so I made Lihis. Because its only 1 PCB which can be used on both sides, the [previous] name wasn't so funny anymore, and I decided to change it to another popular grill food "Lihapiirakka" or meat pie, and lihis is a shortened version of that – Cedutus.
With regards to workflow, Eetu followed various keyboard design guides, but most of the time he borrowed ideas and copied parts from other keyboards, like the Corne or Grandiceps (especially Grandiceps because of the Blackpill pinout).
Here is a small gallery with some shots of the PCB, bottom plate, switch plate and controller: https://imgur.com/a/LDiEfqi
As a whole Lihis is pretty basic, but it was made for me by me. I don't really care for LEDs, and I never used an OLED screen on my keyboard, so they weren't included, but hotswap is basically mandatory for me, and I included Choc hotswap as well just for fun.
As a commemorative side-note, the artworks on the controller covers come from a sticker pack and I have to confess I'm in love with the right one (by Greg Guillemin).
Github repo: https://github.com/Cedutus/Lihis
Eetu is going to start another project which would include a number row for gaming.
Published on Sun 22nd May 2022. Featured in KBD #79 (source).
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