Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Purple Owl
Sonal Pinto's Purple Owl is an all-1u, uniformly staggered 60% keyboard.
Published August 11, 2022
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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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