Any good, mostly-automatic tooling to go from a Keyboard Layout Editor (KLE)[1] JSON to a laid-out (not necessarily routed) PCB design in something like KiCad?
A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> omitting "unnecessary" keys .... without removing my hands from the home row The "keep hands on home row" is the motivation behind omitting the "unnecessary" keys, at least for the keyboards which use a small spacebar and give the thumbs more keys to use. With those small 36-key keyboards, your hands pretty much have nowhere to go except to remain on home row. > as many keys as possible I once saw someone made a ke…
These small keyboards are usually ortholinear which also helps reducing hand movement. I switched to a OLKB Preonic over a year ago and haven't looked back. After you get used to the smaller factor and non staggered keys format you realize how ridiculously and unnecessarily huge and clunky traditional keyboards are, even laptop keyboards. It's like traveling with a 65 liters bag for years before you learn you can jus…
less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key.
In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After some struggle coming to terms with thumb keys and wells and ortholinerness I switched to it for all tasks except for gaming and my symptoms basically disapeared.
About 10 years back I was in a job that was potentially going to cause me to travel a lot, at that point I had already modded my kinesis advange keyboards with custom controllers and wanted to try and build something that travelled better, was smaller, while still not fucking up my wrists.
I built a lot of keyboards trying to shrink my luggage. I went ortho and built a split preonic, uncomfortable, then I went down the road that leads to corne/iris/etc (thumb keys, vertically aligned but not horizontally aligned). More comfortable but the thing i always ran into when removing keys. Overhead, you have to remember what layer and key you put xyz rarely used symbol on (and when you are a software engineer that's a lot of the symbols).. at the end of the road I built a very low profile board based on the dactyl with the same number of keys as the kinesis advantage minus the f-key chicklets. Reducing the number of layers i have to remember to 1 that only contains the grave and the fkeys.
Then covid hit and I didn't have to travel anywhere. I take my dactyl when I go see my parents, and unloaded most of my other boards for cheap. (i kept a 65 that I play games with)
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#53What I really want is a mechanical backlit keyboard without terrible PWM flicker. It's so hard on the eyes. Just regular DC dimming would be ideal.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#54What I really want is a mechanical backlit keyboard without terrible PWM flicker. It's so hard on the eyes. Just regular DC dimming would be ideal.
Much easier to just up the PWM frequency
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#55As an amateur EE, here my thoughts. If you can do CAD you can probably also design a PCB with a socket for some kind of general purpose MCU or even one of ready-made keyboard controllers. Through-hole soldering is IMO actually simpler than making these "spiders" (that's how in my country we call circuits with self-supported wire to wire joints, usually with at least some components hanging in air by their leads). "Sp…
As an non-amateur EE, i fully agree with this. If you can draw a basic circuit for 9 keys on paper, you can draw a full-keyboard one in many of the easy cheap PCB platforms, most of which offer a web interface (no installation of any weird software), rendered 3d views and a very cheap production price.
If you really want to do it without a chinese PCB manufacturer, you can do it on a perf board ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfboard ). If you have more GPIOs than keys (eg when building a very cheap steam deck with 9/12 keys), you don't even need any kind of "matrix" multiplexing, and you can just connect the keys to individual gpio pins. If you take a better microcontroller than a teensy, you also get bluetooth (and wifi) capabilities, like with eg. esp32 (~$5 on aliexpress).
But either way, doing fun electronics, be it on a pcb or when soldering "in the air" is a lot better waste of money and time than many other things most people do.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
These small keyboards are usually ortholinear which also helps reducing hand movement. I switched to a OLKB Preonic over a year ago and haven't looked back. After you get used to the smaller factor and non staggered keys format you realize how ridiculously and unnecessarily huge and clunky traditional keyboards are, even laptop keyboards. It's like traveling with a 65 liters bag for years before you learn you can jus…
less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key. In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After som…
> less keys = more cognitive overhead.
Right.
The benefits of reducing hand travel / stretching come at the cost of additional complexity. Not everyone will be comfortable with that complexity.
I find the complexity acceptable; and in many ways more coherent than traditional layouts. e.g. I'd keep slash and backslash (/\) adjacent (or otherwise paired); a question mark (?) is frequent enough even in prose; so, pipe (|) remains paired to backslash. -- But, yeah, it can be annoying for keys which are used very infrequently.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#57Is there a general source of the, seemingly modern day, fascination with keyboards?
I buy the Logitech ergonomic mice and keyboards and call it a day, because they save my wrists but aren't crazy, are easy to buy off the shelf, and integrate well together. For example, I use two different mice and a keyboard across two computers with a single USB receiver with just a simple KVM built-in to my monitor.
In my personal experience with computers, the keyboard is the least limiting factor with regards to my interaction.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#58What I really want is a mechanical backlit keyboard without terrible PWM flicker. It's so hard on the eyes. Just regular DC dimming would be ideal.
Much easier to just up the PWM frequency
Maybe. Are there any with very high PWM frequency? It's not well analyzed right now like screens are.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#59Is there a general source of the, seemingly modern day, fascination with keyboards? I buy the Logitech ergonomic mice and keyboards and call it a day, because they save my wrists but aren't crazy, are easy to buy off the shelf, and integrate well together. For example, I use two different mice and a keyboard across two computers with a single USB receiver with just a simple KVM built-in to my monitor. In my personal…
It's a mix of three different cultural factors long extant in the programming community which came together to create today's keyboard culture:
1. Keyboard elitism
Until as late as the early 2000s, there was a lot of elitism in programming circles about how using the mouse was something only "lusers" did. Keyboarding was supposedly faster than mousing (even though programmers do a lot more thinking than either keyboarding or mousing) and was the mark of an expert user. These communities would often shill certain keyboards, like the IBM Model M, or the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) because of their resilience and the feedback one felt from clacking the keys.
2. Customizing/Hacking
Not much has to be said here. Hackers have been customizing their setups for as long as setups could be customized. The ability to program custom keyboard layouts and make custom keyboard firmware is as iconic hacking as it gets.
3. Setup as identity culture
From the late 2000s, Unix Porn and a lot of other "setup porn" stuff became very popular. People would make cool setups that they really identified with and so setting up your keyboard to express your personal identity became a bit of a hacker rite of passage.
While keyboard culture may have started with these ingredients, it's definitely its own thing these days. I'm not in it myself but I like watching it from the sidelines and it's really cool to see what people come up with. Cool layouts, custom firmware, colored keys, experimenting with different layouts. It's just like trying to get the perfect emacs config: more bikeshedding than productivity hack, but I mean it's a hobby, and a fun enriching one at that.
As you say the more practical thing is to just buy an ergo keyboard that works with your wrists/shoulders/neck and call it a day. I have a Model M from when I was an impressionable teen who thought owning a Model M and not using the mouse was the be-all-end-all of being a power computer user, but I mostly use a Kinesis Ergo for my day-to-day computing needs. I'm at a (hybrid) startup these days and we don't really have a dedicated office to store stuff in so I bring an HHKB in to the office because of its portability. I use trackballs for my mousing. That's about it. Holding my arms, wrists, and back in ergo positions is much more important to me than any keyboard really. Though really rock climbing has been the single thing that helped my wrists beat RSI where nothing else really could.
Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because moving your hand is a one time effort vs moving it up and down the keyboard to enter those pesky 6 digit TOTP codes where the digits could be at opposite ends of the keyboard. Plus I’ve been using keyboards longer than a lot of (probably most) developers on here have been alive and I haven’t ever found using the number pad to be even remotely an effort.
It's a one time effort you can easily avoid with a much smaller one time effort (tapping/holding a very convenient numpad layer modifier). And it's especially a wasted effort for very short numbers like TOTPs And all the digits are right there, not at some opposite ends, e.g., UIO789 JKL456 M,.123 on a qwerty
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.