Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Noisy Cricket keyboard
The Noisy Cricket by u/Pop-X- was heavily inspired by Thomas Baart's Kyria and the Ferris.
KBD.news
Published January 23, 2022
Published January 23, 2022

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The Noisy Cricket is a 34-40 key split keyboard that runs QMK (and provisionally KMK). Design goals were: portability, feature-richness and choc spacing.
It's my take on a minimalist keyboard that's taken a feature-dense turn, most of which revolves around the highly customizable thumb clusters – Pop-X-.
Inspired by Thomas Baart's Kyria but with some differences like Choc spacing, 5 columns by default, and a more compact thumb cluster that "doesn’t require the contortions common in other small keyboards". It has less arc than the Kyria’s.
The outer keys in the Kyria’s roomy cluster notably don’t require these contortions, which is what in part inspired me to combine certain attributes of the Ferris and Kyria here. The choc spacing also makes vertical combos (chording) on the Ncricket’s cluster easy! – Pop-X-.
Features
- Powered by STM32F411 "blackpill" development boards
- Kailh hotswap or soldered choc switches.
- 20 WS2812B RGB underglow
- 2 roller encoders
- 2 rotary encoders
- 2 pimoroni trackballs with a choice of two positions (the other being directly below the blackpill)
- 2 128x32 OLEDs
- a Pimoroni haptic module (master side only, for now)
Unfortunately, not open source (atm). Chech the original post for the link to the interest check form.
The board is already revised to remove the need for the bodge you see on the right half and the ST-Link sockets on the left, haha – Pop-X-.
Published on Sun 23rd Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #62 (source).





