Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
NINE keyboard
NINE by But She's a Girl is an updated Piano – with PCB and case files shared.
Published February 20, 2023
I would have completely missed But She's a Girl's minimalist 18-key NINE keyboard – based on Ben Vallack's Piano – if it wasn't Flubert Harnsworth's Reddit post.
Published in January, BSAG did a great job with the Nine to adapt an existing design to her hands and needs.
Not just heavily inspired by the Piano (see Ben's write-up for last year's MK Advent Calendar) but an updated recreation of the original PCB with some modifications:
- Angled and shifted thumb keys
- Controller moved to the inner top corner (to make it easier to plug the cable in and still use the keyboard while it is charging)
- Battery moved to the back of the PCB (to allow upgrading to a larger one)
- Updated shape for increased stability
- Adding nice!view displays
Ben’s original design used Ergogen to generate the PCB layout, but while I had some success moving the thumb keys using that method, I found it tricky to figure out how to incorporate the pads and wiring needed for the nice!view. In the end, I decided that if I was going to do this, I might as well learn from scratch how to build a keyboard from the schematics up using KiCad. So that’s what I did: I recreated the design from scratch, building in the alterations I wanted to make as I went – But She's a Girl.
The repo contains a nice case as well:
And according to BSAG, she's still daily driving and loving it.
Resources
This project is a good example of praiseworthy documentation:
Published on Mon 20th Feb 2023. Featured in KBD #114 (source).
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