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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
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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:

And according to BSAG, she's still daily driving and loving it.

Resources

This project is a good example of praiseworthy documentation:

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Published on Mon 20th Feb 2023. Featured in KBD #114 (source).

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