This is fair lol. Just one of those details I half glossed over and half was with the mentality “if this is supposed to be the logo for this product, then it should be the same wherever it appears”

• After the initial learning curve, you get a more comfortable and less injury-prone typing experience

• Totally customizable firmware

• Colemak is a lot more efficient than QWERTY. Look up “Colemak vs QWERTY heat map”

• Fun project

• Fun flex

• Why not?

Don't be discouraged! I would start by saying that it takes time and you learn as you go. When I first started this project, I didn't know anything about PCB design and had minimal 3D printing experience and 0 experience with keyboard firmware. These things can seem super daunting, but the PCB design side is really just dragging parts around into the right places and then connecting them together with little copper traces. Soldering is really quite easy and a great skill for anyone to learn! I'm definitely a lot better at it now than when I first started soldering my own instrument cables, but that's the nice thing about soldering: you can really do a pretty sloppy job, but as long as you make an electrical connection, you can get by just fine. There's actually no real coding involved with this project as I was really just modifying text files according to the ZMK documentation and then it builds the firmware for you. It really helps a lot to compare to other designs that are out there! The fact that I modified my board from the Corne was a huge help in that I could go back and reference their PCB, ZMK files, etc. if I got confused.

Good luck!

This is a dream for data entry! Numpad and mouse at the same time. Nice.

Thanks! Would you mind clarifying your question? In the main picture you can see the second half of the board behind the first. Also the two halves are more clearly shown in the imgur album linked in my comment below! If you’re asking whether the PCB has two sides or one, it is a reversible PCB with two sides! So each PCB is the exact same, just opposite sides for each half.

It's not as bad as you might think, especially if you're going with a kit / something that's popular and out there. As far as tips go, you could try to practice soldering some if you've never done it before? But that's really not too tough either and you could pull it off for the first time on a board probably. Building yourself is a great idea if you know it'll save you some money, and makes having the end product much more gratifying in my opinion! I would definitely say to go for it. There's lots of people in the community that are willing to help out if you don't know what you're doing (Discord servers are nice for that)

Ha yeah. I did get to do my “who am I” PowerPoint and it was featured in there under my hobbies section, but it would be sweet to have it there. The wireless is super sweet for connecting to mobile devices.

That’s awesome! Yeah it definitely takes some time. I really wish I could bring this into work but unfortunately I’m working in a classified space so no Bluetooth devices allowed :(

I’ll pm you! Automoderator was giving me some pushback for linking them in my comment.

Yeah definitely! It was cool to not be rushed at all on the design process and tweak everything just how I wanted it over the course of a few weeks.

Thanks so much! Glad you think so.

It's a lot of fun. Are you leaning towards a particular design? Wireless or wired?

Thanks much! Hmm. I have been working on and off on it for the past 9 months or so. But honestly there were probably only like 7-10 days in that span where I was actually working on it for multiple hours of a day.

Full album

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.

Full story

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.