Keyboard Builders' Digest
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Issue 110 / Week 1 / 2023

This is a hand-picked selection of last week's content from a keyboard enthusiast's perspective. Posts that may teach you something, make you think and contribute to the common knowledge of the DIY builder community.

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Contents

Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 110

Ongoing projects, Kamakura, new year's resolution, etc.

Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #110), a weekly roundup of this DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi – that's me. If you are new to this, you can read how this started out and what this is all about nowadays. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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A lot of stuff is going on behind the scenes but not much to show off yet. I'm working on some articles as well, a review and a piece on a strange early typewriter, but I'm waiting for permission to use some archive photos.

Azimuth PCB?

I have a bunch of low-pro POM MBK/MCC caps at hand (thanks MoErgo/SplitKB!) and I have to draw up some plates with various spacings to be able to showcase/compare/review them (I have only MX spaced plates right now). So, instead of editing my daily driver Azimuth's plate – originally drawn from scratch in Inkscape –, I thought I'd recreate the whole project via Ergogen. That could end up as a PCB of the originally handwired board as a byproduct.

Well… After some research now I understand the comments reflecting to MrZealot's Ergogen v4.0 post about the docs… :D

To say the truth, designing more traditional split layouts would be probably a breeze, but mine has a pretty unique pinky cluster, as well as some stray keys here and there. Anyway, I'll keep researching existing YAML files to understand what I should do.

Kamakura

Hide-key's lion head macropad brought back fond memories: the word "Kamakura" – a place and the name of a Shinto shrine – sounded too familiar, and after some thinking I realized I was there many years ago.

I missed the amulets mentioned in the post but visited the huge Buddha statue. And then walked to the nearby island of Enoshima with my wife. She was pregnant at the time and couldn't really eat anything, especially raw and unfamiliar Japanese food – and coming from a landlocked European country, pretty much every Japanese food looked unfamiliar. :D And then, on the bridge connecting Kamakura with the island, we eventually stumbled upon some food she could eat: ice cream in matcha and sweet potato flavor. :D

Keylogging project

I had three kbd.news-related new year's resolutions in 2021 – and managed to realize two of them. Sort of. One was regularly posting on twitter, the other was to learn all the 2,200 joyo kanji to better understand Japanese texts – I can only recognize them, no clue how to pronounce most of them, nor could I write them I guess. (And I have no idea what the third resolution was. :D)

For this year I'm quite late, but have some ideas. One of them is logging my keystrokes all year long. Keyloggers have their pros and cons, but knowing the cons this project may turn out as something useful.

Benign keylogger seems to be harmless. Its code is short and clear enough to check for any suspicious behavior, so I set it up and will have a decent dataset soon. Only about 360 days to go for a full year's worth of gigantic typing test. :D

Since this piece of code logs timestamps as well, I'll be able to do much more than language statistics. I'm particularly interested in active/passive periods, length of typing sessions, as well as general typing speeds – not artificial runs like e.g. in monkeytype.

A few years ago I read a blog post from somebody. I can't remember the name but he was a German software dev doing a similar keylogging project. He ended up at about 4 million keystrokes/year if I remember correctly.

If you are interested, try to set this one or the keylogger of your choice. Let's turn this into a community experiment. And we can do a comparison in 12 months or even more frequently. I had some difficulties during installation/setup, but restarting my PC solved the issue with the environmental variables.

Quick news

Vendor database

I'm waiting for feedback from some new shops/projects. Some updates but no additions this time.

Meetup database

No new meetup either.

As always, this meetup database is both a calendar and an archive, so feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Donors

No new donors this time. Thanks to all the regular supporters!

If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Small developments

  • Only some small fixes: Usually, I put images and issues in directories with names of the actual year – approaching 2,000 projects, that helps to keep things organized. But since we have a new year, there was some expected strange behavior until I found some hardcoded years – mostly in utility scripts, e.g. the one generating the cover image. ;)

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That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.

Cheers, Tamás

Projects

Atreyu V2

New year, new Atreyu. Rev2 with choc spacing by jcliment.

Jesus Climent published his latest Atreyu. After last year's Atreyu V1, Rev2 is a low-profile monoblock split keyboard with Choc spacing and some new features:

Specs

  • New options for MCUs:
    • Pro Micro: with this MCU the functionality of the keyboard is only reduced by not being able to use encoders.
    • Elite-C, Elite-Pi, Puchi, Frood: all the functionality, i.e. OLED, encoders, all keys.
    • Nice!Nano v2: all functionality plus wireless! (Some restrictions apply.)
  • OLED screen support: pins for a 32x128 screen over the MCU
  • Wireless support: Space for a battery, with power kill switch and pins for soldering the battery to the PCB, currently for a 500mAh
  • 5 underglow LEDs (SK6812Mini-E slots) as status indicators.

Some pins are shared across the OLED, the encoders and the LEDs, so they require sacrificing one in favor of the other. E.g. in a board with OLED and LEDs, one can only have one encoder.

Different versions of the PCB will be released for different battery sizes. And Rev2 with MX spacing will be released soon.

Resources

Ostrich

Ostrich – a diodeless monoblock keyboard with splayed pinky columns by keyboarddweebs.

Alex Miller shared his new 34-key unibody split: the Ostrich.

This looks like a mash-up of his two previous projects: the monoblock Crowboard and the split Budgy – both sporting Pi Picos. The Ostrich is like a reunited Budgy but with some pinky splay.

My latest creation. I call it the Ostrich. Single board, diodeless, 34 key keyboard with splayed pinky columns. Inspired by Reviung's canted MCU. The project is also open source – keyboarddweebs.

Resources

Pierce 2.0

Pierce 2.0 is a semi-wireless split by durken1.

The first version was featured back in 2021, and V2 has been around for some time as well. A post by chewiedies pointed me to durken's repo so here is pierce 2.0 for history's sake.

pierce 2.0 is a split modular wireless / semi-wireless 36 key column staggered keyboard. The design is inspired by Corne with more pinky stagger as well as only using 1u keycaps – durken1.

I'm not entirely sure about what specs have been updated. You can build a wireless version or a semi wireless version. For the wireless version an additional receiver dongle is required, while in the semi-wireless version the wired half is acting as a receiver for the wireless half.

Accordingly, there are 3 different PCBs in the repo: wireless (reversible), wired (right), and the receiver.

Supported switches are: MX, Choc V1 and Alps.

Resources

KLOR KS-27 switch edition

Sadek Baroudi shared his KLOR variant with KS-27 switches.

Sadek Baroudi published a KS-27 edition of GEIST's KLOR. This is a modded version of the KLOR PCB using soldered low-pro KS-27 switches instead of MX hotswap. Trackball support has been removed in the process to simplify routing.

So, GEIST makes awesome keyboards… I wanted the KLOR, but low profile. So, I adapted the original PCB to support KS-27 switches (not hotswap). I realized after I did this… I could not take advantage of the original case, since the pcb height relative to the case had now changed significantly (3.4mm closer). This meant I needed to make a new case. In doing so, I wanted to maintain the original style that I love so much! So, this is the result! – Sadek.

Resources

Noname ortho

A noname 5x14 ortho keyboard with underside socketed STM32 Blackpill – open sourced by steven3051.

People, give a proper and unique name to your projects so others can reference it!

The UnnamedKB1 is an open-source 5x14 ortholinear keyboard by steven3051 aka djask sporting a daughterboard on the bottom of the PCB.

This was my first time designing a keyboard, and wanted to make something with the STM32 which didn't involve it sticking out on the top of the PCB, but also able to fit in a way that allowed a natural incline of the keyboard – steven3051.

USB port issue

Pic:

Steven actually doesn't recommend doing something like this with the controller board positioned the way depicted above. Eventually he desoldered the USB port and the two 5.1k resistors to shift to the PCB so that he can plug in a cable from the top and not the side.

There is no way to do it without it either sticking out the side or doing it vertically which makes the board taller. The blackpill board has A11 and A12 for USB D+/- pins available, so I added a USB C connection on the PCB itself to these 2 pins.

Pic:

Design process

The author used Keyboard Layout Editor to generate the layout, and then made the schema in Kicad and laid out all the footprints with a python script with Kicad's pcbnew python interface.

The case is created with CadQuery in jupyter notebook.

Resources

TypeSafe with joystick

Tewtham added a joystick to his vertical TypeSafe keyboard.

Inspired by the crazy SafeType with mirrors, the TypeSafe has been featured on kbd.news here and here. This time tewtham updated the repo with nenw STLs of a joystick version.

I’m using the joystick for modifiers atm (down for shift, left for cmd, etc. with combos on the diagonals) but it also can switch to arrows, repeating faster the further I push – tewtham.

For stability, they are weighted and have non-slip pads on the bottom.

The author commented he has been using some version of this keyboard as his daily driver (8 hr/day programming mostly) for a few years now, and for his personal use it’s getting close to perfect.

For another vertical approach see the Squeezebox by Peter Lyons.

Pic:

Resources

Thumbs Up MCU options

Some new variations of the Thumbs Up! by ak66666. Low profile and multiple MCU options.

Previous iterations of Sasha Karmanov's Thumbs UP! supported MX/Choc/ALPS switches. The latest V2 versions support only Kailh Choc with hotswap sockets or soldering options.

They got spacing compressed, so the gap between the caps is smaller – ak66666.

The author made three different versions this time: one with an on-board Atmega chip, another with on-board RP2040, and one more for Pro Micro compatible boards.

Pic:

The latter was also created with Nice!Nano in mind, to get a wireless keyboard, in which case there's a power switch on the middle layer to disconnect the battery.

Resources

As I can see, the documentation hasn't been updated, but there are some files on github:

Lion Head macropad

Kamakura-gū Lion Head macropad by hide-key sporting a XIAO RP2040 controller and encoders.

I spotted this creative macropad in Hideki Nakamura's (aka hide-key) github last week when sniffing around for his sunflower macropad and Christmas ornament PCB files. It wasn't published at that time but build guides have been added to the repo in the meantime both in Japanese and English so here it is.

As of my understanding, the lion head motif is one of the traditional amulets offered in the Kamakura-gu shrine against evil.

I thought that the nose part of the lion's head of the amulet looks like a keycap, so I improvised a keypad (?). In addition to the three keys, I made it possible to turn the ear part with a rotary encoder. Please don't ask what is it used for ;P – hide-key.

Pic:

Resources

Tips & Tricks

Shift Happens

Marcin Wichary's upcoming book on typewriters and keyboards, Shift Happens, has a dedicated site now.

Avid readers know full well that I don't really feature kickstarters, not to mention teasers of upcoming kickstarters, but I'm pretty sure you'll agree with me to make an exception this time after you've learned about Marcin Wichary's book in the making: Shift Happens.

Shift Happens is an impressive three-volume (2+1) bundle on typewriters, keyboards, and their 150-year evolution – the exact topics which make my heart beat faster.

Shift Happens tells the story of keyboards like no book ever before, covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets – Marcin Wichary.

Marcin, design manager at Figma and also an excellent storyteller, has been working on this project since 2016, when he stumbled upon a typewriter museum in Spain. That's a pretty long time you may say, but learning about the meticulous research process (updates in his newsletter) and e.g. the way old photos were carefully restored or new ones fixed prove these years of work were well spent.

Specs

  • 2+1 volumes
  • 1,200 pages
  • 42 chapters
  • 1,300 photographs, 520 taken exclusively for this book
  • 37 Easter Eggs

Highlights

I reached out to Marcin to ask for some highlights he finds important for the quite freakish audience of kbd.news, so here is a list in his own words:

  • I interviewed quite a few community members like Jesse Vincent, Jacob Alexander, Thomas Ran, and a few of them and their projects are in the book
  • there are stories of early adopters of typewriters and home computers that you might find relatable
  • there are quite a few chapters about the keyboard community, key switches, layouts, key caps, etc.
  • also one whole chapter about ergo keyboards, and one whole chapter about chorded/assistive keyboards (both with gorgeous photos)
  • the stories of earlier makers like Dvorak or Blickensderfer might be interesting to people who are makers
  • there will be a lot of great photos of rare keyboards that themselves might be inspiring in projects
  • I’d like to believe that the ethos of the book itself is compatible. I contributed a lot of scans to the Internet Archive, plan to release all the photos under a permissive license in the future. (more info here, here and here)
  • I also myself built at least one strange keyboard

Pic:

By the way, the archive of Marcin's posts is a warehouse of great keyboard content even without being featured in a printed book. In the recent years I've come across his articles and tweets regularly when doing my own research, e.g. referenced a twitter thread (Berthold Diatronic) just a couple of days ago.

Resources

Kickstarter in February. Shipping expected in late summer/fall of 2023.

NK Cream+ with inserts

The NK Cream+ switches from NovelKeys come with different inserts that alter the sound profile.

The Cream+ switches by NovelKeys feature a unique hollowed stem, allowing the placement of inserts made of various materials that alter the sound profile of the switch.

The inserts (copper, titanium and silicone) come separately in packs of 120 and are put into the hollow stem of a Cream+ switch.

Specs

  • Type: linear
  • Travel distance: 2mm actuation, 4mm bottom
  • Force: 50g operating, 63.5g bottom
  • Mount: PCB

Normal travel distance without an insert. The inserts are pretty small – mgsickler.

And a short sound test by alexotos:

Resources

Art Deco Macropad Case

A Bioshock inspired art deco macropad case by ZackGear.

MrRogers aka ZackGear shared a 6-key macropad case based on the Art Deco architecture design from Bioshock and Fallout series.

The macropad is handwired, but uses a wireless controller from a broken Logitech keyboard.

  • Printed on Saturn 2 resin 3D printer with ELEGOO standard translucent resin.
  • Sliced in Lychee with autogenerated medium supports, 4hrs to print.
  • SA Nuclear keycaps.
  • Wired up with the remains of a broken wireless Logitech keyboard.

Resources

That was Issue #110. Thanks for stopping by.

This issue was made possible by the donations of:
splitkb.com, MoErgo Glove80, u/chad3814, Aiksplace, @keebio, @kaleid1990, MKUltra, Upgrade Keyboards, Sean Grady, Keebstuff, ghsear.ch, cdc, KEEBD, u/motfalcon, Jacob Mikesell, Bob Cotton, kiyejoco, Richard Sutherland, FFKeebs, @therick0996, Joel Simpson, littlemer-the-second, Lev Popov, Christian Mladenov, Christian Lo, Spencer Blackwood, Yuan Liu, Daniel Nikolov, u/eighty58five, Skyler Thuss, Caleb Rand, Davidjohn Gerena, Fabian Suceveanu, Arto Olli, anonymous, Hating TheFruit, Mats Faugli

Your support is crucial to help this project to survive.

Discussion over at r/mk!
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