Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
gurt-portable
The wireless gurt-portable is u/Gurtmail's first keyboard design.
Published May 30, 2022
Gurtmail's gurt-portable is a wireless split keyboard with two thumb keys per half, pinky splay, and keywellized via tilted stems/adapters. Inspired by durken1's pierce and similar to SouthPawEngineer's Centromere.
Finally done with my first keyboard design! The reason I designed this keyboard is because I wanted a smaller and more portable keyboard to complement the keyboard I use on my main computer (lil chonky bois) – Gurtmail.
Gurtmail wanted the keyboard to be wireless and to run QMK so he went with a dongle approach, based on the pierce keyboard by durken1 (repo).
The gurt-portable uses the same dongle and firmware on the wireless modules just with different pins.
Designing the desired layout started in ergogen. For the prototype plates Gurtmail imported the outlines from ergogen into Blender and made the plates using that as reference.
After I was happy with the layout I imported the outlines into kicad and organised the switches according to the layout. I know there is a way to do this automatically using ergogen but I didn't bother to learn how to.
A few weeks ago, in KBD#77 I featured Gurtmail's tilted adapter for Choc-compatible keycaps – also used here.
The tilted keycaps are still very much in the testing phase so I haven't decided if they will stay on the keyboard quite yet – Gurtmail.
Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/lQ4O9dc
GitHub repo: https://github.com/CarlFabian/gurt-portable
Published on Mon 30th May 2022. Featured in KBD #80 (source).
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