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This is my custom keyboard design! As you can see, it is a split, ergonomic, wireless build that is modeled after the Corne. The major differences are (1) the more extreme column stagger and (2) the extra thumbkey per side. It’s also wireless thanks to the nice!nano boards (a wireless, drop-in replacement for the Pro Micro/Elite-C) so all LEDs and OLED were stripped to conserve battery as well as the TRRS jack since the halves connect to each other wirelessly also. Another minor change is that I opted for Mill-Max hot swap sockets rather than the Kailh variants.

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I started this out about a year ago after having checked in on this sub every now and then for the last few years. I started off thinking I was just going to buy a QMK compatible 75% kit with some nice switches and put it together as a little project. As I kept going down the rabbit hole, I started to become really interested in the ergonomic side of things and alternative layouts. Huge credit to Ben Vallack for pulling me into this hole — definitely check out his channel if you’re interested! He recently designed a board with only 9 keys per side just to push the extreme.

Design/Build Process

As far as my design process goes, you’ll notice in the photos that I started purely on paper, and I highly recommend this to anyone starting out. Take an open source PCB and print out the layout to scale, then pretend to type on it and get a feel for the layout. You can tape some keycaps down in place to get a more realistic feel (I even started with just cardboard squares lol). This is where I decided that while I liked the column stagger that the Corne introduced, I wanted a bit more and figured I could just modify it to fit the natural stagger of my fingers. I measured out the distances between each and shifted the columns around until I found something I really liked. From here I stripped the parts I didn’t need, modified footprints to fit my needs (making the pads a bit wider helped a lot with soldering the Mill-Max sockets), and rerouted the whole thing. It’s a reversible PCB, which I did to save money. PCBWay is my go-to manufacturer so I ordered from there and then it was time to design a case. I did this in Fusion 360 and used a resin 3D printer I had access to at work to fabricate it. The case was designed to allow for tenting at a variety of angles, but the accessory parts that were designed to allow this ended up warping pretty badly due to their thinness, so I just ended up using the main case parts. The switch plates are also 3D printed and didn’t warp quite as badly, but I would love to redo these by laser-cutting them from acrylic or aluminum. Lastly, the firmware! I’m using ZMK, which is kind of like QMK but geared toward wireless builds. They also use GitHub actions to really streamline the build/setup process. I’m using the Colemak DH (aka Colemak Mod-DH or DHm) layout, so setting this was the first step, but also wanted the option to switch to a QWERTY layer. FWIW, I’m using colemakacademy to learn it and I’m up to a measly 38 WPM on “level 3” which includes only the 14 most used keys — really great website and couldn’t think of a better way to learn a new layout. It took me a while to set the rest of the layout for symbols and modifiers and everything, and I’m really glad I implemented the additional thumbkeys for this part. I ended up with 6 total layers: the Colemak and QWERTY layers, raise and lower, function/media keys (super nice for my iOS devices — volume, brightness, and media controls), and numpad. There was some odd troubleshooting I had to do where the right half wasn’t pairing to the left half properly and a few issues with layers because I didn’t know that their order in the .keymap file mattered, but I finally got it working like I want!

Using some blank PBT keycaps from AliExpress and the Boba U4 silent tactiles which I’m loving!

This project has been super fulfilling to complete and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested! If you have any questions at all, please let me know!

Shoutout Tony if you’re reading this. Hope I made you proud.