NINE keyboard

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NINE keyboard

NINE by But She's a Girl is an updated Piano – with PCB and case files shared.

KBD.news
Published February 20, 2023

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 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:

Pic: