Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Purple Owl
Sonal Pinto's Purple Owl is an all-1u, uniformly staggered 60% keyboard.
Published August 11, 2022
Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 100K readers.
The Purple Owl by Sonal Pinto aka leafcutter64 was inspired by the works of Ziptyze with their Zlant (4x12) and ZlantXL (5x12).
In my excitement, I drafted a basic diode matrix (5 rows, 14 columns) and sent it out to fab without a second thought. The prototypes were back really quick. Loving the layout - and I am really impressed how small it appears compared to my 65% (KBD67 Lite R3). Now, I need to hit the laser cutter to make some plates – lasercutter64.
The author describes this board being almost like a staggered 5-row Preonic but with more columns and a narrow bottom row to offer the visual aesthetics of four dominant rows like a Plank.
Specs
- Each row has a 0.25u stagger unlike a traditional row-stagger.
- There are 14 columns to accommodate the outer symbols (-=[]\).
- The right Shift can be traded in for an arrow cluster.
- The Ctrl, Shift and other mods are designed to be under the thumbs with a symmetric bottom row that has a 2u surrounded by two 1u on each side.
- The board runs on KMK, so the keys can be freely mapped.
As far as the electronics goes, the typical diode matrix requires a fair amount of GPIO pins which restricts aesthetic microcontroller placement. Hence, it is on the side in this prototype.
The design in the photo above is already old because a few days after receiving the PCBs Sonal was inspired by Peng Zhihui's HanWen – using shift registers.
Initially, I wanted to integrate the RP2040 on the board itself. Now, I only need 3 logic GPIOs to scan the switches, and a tiny microcontroller (like the Seeed XIAO) is totally viable and can be invisibly underneath the switches.
The GitHub repo already reflects this second approach:
https://github.com/SonalPinto/purple-owl
(Thanks for the credit!)
Published on Thu 11th Aug 2022. Featured in KBD #90 (source).
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