A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)

#71

Post by unnouinceput » Sat, Aug 26, 2023, 10:34 AM UTC

nick__m wrote: post #68

unnouinceput wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because I'm experienced in ESP32 and not in STM8. But now that you mention it, a little seed started to grow. Thank you kind stranger, lemme get back to you when this will probably 2 years from now on and another $2000 in research/playing around.

I said stm8 but there are a lot's of cheap microcontroller, I don't know what you use to program your esp32 but you should have a look at platform.io . I use that list https://registry.platformio.org/search?t=platform&p=1 to select MCU's for my projects. The thing I like the most about it is that I don't have to manually install and managed various tool chains and it's a lot more flexible than the Arduino ide.

I use Free Pascal/Lazarus to target anything, ESP32 included. As for IDE where it runs, in a nice VM with plenty of processing power and memory on my PC so I can fast iterate code to production.

Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)

#72

Post by barrenko » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 7:42 AM UTC

hellweaver666 wrote: post #18

Building your own keyboards is super satisfying. I started off hand-wiring a couple of macropads and then built a 60% handwire and a split ergo. Finally with all the knowledge I learnt I designed a PCB for a macropad and then just scaled up to my own keyboard which is a 50% ortholinear keyboard which has three extra "macro" switches on the side. I found a switch footprint that allows it to take "normal" or "low profi…

Could you please post a picture as well? (this goes out to other enthusiasts in this post)

Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)

#73

Post by winrid » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 7:43 AM UTC

thorncorona wrote: post #54

winrid wrote: post #53

What 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

My 2018 X1 carbon's laptop backlight, which is adjustable, does not have flicker when recorded in slow-mo, so honestly don't see the excuse really.

Re: A complete guide to building a hand-wired keyboard (2020)

#74

Post by hnlmorg » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #67

hnlmorg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I got that, but I disagree having to hold down down additional keys to enable that mode, and importantly in my case, having to remember to hold them down is less effort then moving your wrist two or three inches. Ultimately there’s going to be a lot of personal habit baked into these preferences and we are talking about micro-optimisations at best anyway. Which I why I think it’s probably better to just agree to…

You don't need to remember since you don't need to hold it down, you can toggle Or both, hold for shorter totp codes, toggle for longer data entry sessions Or you could have a one-shot modifier where for single numbers you wouldn't need to hold anything (while avoiding having to frequently move your hand back and forth just for a single symbol). This works similar to one-shot shift for a First Letter Cap And the mist…

Everything about keyboard preference is to do with personal habit. Using a keyboard effectively requires committing actions to muscle memory. Which is literally just another way of saying personal habits.

The ironic thing is this conversation of ours would have cost us more energy than what would have been saved from a lifetime of any of your keyboard optimisations. Which is why I roll my eyes when people try to intellectualise their keyboard preferences as some kind of revolutionary time and effort saver.