Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
nowt36
Tamago324 published his nowt36, a classy angled monoblock split.
Published September 14, 2022
Tamago324, who is a software developer living in Japan, has been working on this model for some time. I reached out to him in June for the first time but he told me he was not satisfied with his first prototype which has been redesigned since and is available now both for purchase and as an open-source project.
The nowt36 would be just another 5x3 hotswap monoblock split if it wouldn't feature some unique tweaks.
E.g. a small gap between the index and middle fingers. And I can't really tell if there's a fine splay or only a pseudo-splay due to some keys/footprints being set at an angle.
Compared to the first prototype, the minimal curvature of the thumb arc has been completely ditched, and the three keys are along the same straight line.
Tamago couldn't think of a proper name for this keyboard, so at first he called it nnkb (no name keyboard), as you can see on the earlier prototype. However, he wanted to change that to something else because of the unwanted resemblance to hhkb. So, no name keyboard became nn keyboard, then n2 or n two keyboard, finally, by reversing two it ended up as n owt or nowt.
By the way, the inspiration came from the Reviung34, since Tamago was very impressed by the 34-key unibody form factor with a middle-plate.
However, I wanted to make my own keyboard to make the thumb keys a little easier to press – Tamago.
It's been quite a journey since the author dipped his toes into the mechanical keyboard hobby in May, 2021. After assembling some macropads and splits, he created an acrylic plate with KLE and FreeCAD, and made a handwired keyboard. After that, still not satisfied, he decided to make another keyboard based on the SU120 PCB, then the blue nnkb, with a structure similar to the Elephant42 – sandwiched between two pieces of acrylic.
アクリルが綺麗な青色のキーボード出来た！#自作キーボード#俺キー pic.twitter.com/KK2nm4IBpr
— たまたまご (@tamago324_pad) May 31, 2022
Then came the nnkb/nowt prototype 0.1, and eventually the official nowt36 rev1.0.
Tamago also created a keyboard using Choc v1 switches, called nowt36lp. Although he usually uses MX switches, he wanted to make a low-pro keyboard keeping the nowt36 layout.
できた！ pic.twitter.com/jtClnVT4Y6
— たまたまご (@tamago324_pad) August 11, 2022
I like both nowt36 and nowt36lp. These keyboards of mine are available on GitHub and can be used freely because of the CC BY license. If you search for nowt36 or nowt36lp on Twitter, you can see photos of other people's creations. I am very happy to see that they are cooler and prettier than mine.
Resources
Product page: https://tamago324.booth.pm/items/3940394
GitHub repo with build log and Gerbers:
Published on Wed 14th Sep 2022. Featured in KBD #95 (source).
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