Keyboard Builders' Digest / Tools

Try-A-Dactyl

Try-A-Dactyl is an OpenSCAD-based tool by wolfwood to programmatically design splits with keywell (aka dactyls).

KBD.news
Published June 10, 2022

Try-A-Dactyl, an OpenSCAD-based tool to programmatically design splits with keywell, has been around for some time now. As far as I can see, creator James Larkby-Lahet aka wolfwood started working on the repo last September and published the project early May this year.

But what does the tool do? From the project description:

Methodology for custom tuning a concave ortholinear split keyboard with thumb cluster (AKA Dactyl). Centered on OpenSCAD library for designing all sorts of ortholinear keyboards supporting a variety of keycaps including Cherry profile.

According to the author, the goal of this project is to be a flexible API for generating "ortholinear-ish (column-staggered) keyboards, and particularly split, concave keyboards often called dactyls".

So this is a tool to generate keyboards similar to the one made by the author and shown in the photo above.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/wolfwood/tryadactyl

Published on Fri 10th Jun 2022. Featured in KBD #82.

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