Last One, Promise

Published on 2020-11-04 in Kamina Keyboard.

So I finished Turbot Keyboard and while it is a fine keyboard, it turned out to be less convenient to me than the Dorsch 48k Keyboard . The reason for that is that it’s too big, meaning that I have to move my hands to reach keys like Esc or Backspace. Turns out that a large part of the magical touch-typing improvement I got with the Planck layout is not from it being ortholinear (though it certainly helps a lot), but from it being so small, that you don’t move your hands sideways.

Once I realized that, the solution is obvious: I need to take the Planck, break it in two so that I can have my hands farther apart, and add a number row, so that it’s easier to program with it. So I went to the keyboard layout editor and made this:

From there it was the usual process, I made a PCB with a SAMD21 MCU on it, and ordered it:

The switches were on order already. I also found another set of keycaps that are compatible with the low-profile switches, and ordered them too. Today everything arrived all once, so I began assembling.

The keycaps turned out to be a little bit too high and too small for my preference:

So I swapped them with the PBT keycaps I had on my Flatreus Keyboard :

Then I had to use a few transparent key caps I had lying around, because I didn’t have enough of the PBT ones:

Once I had the keyboard all programmed and working, and I knew it’s going to replace my Planck as my daily driver, I decided to swap the key caps with the Planck, so that now both of them have consistent keycaps:

And that’s pretty much it. I’m using that keyboard right now and it’s great so far. I will probably keep it for a long time.