Finished my first build, it turned out prettier than I expected honestly. I got a diodeless kit because I had never soldered anything before, it was quite a fun learning experience. Also my first mechanical keyboard, I'm really enjoying the feel of the keys (Kailh sunset).

I was really worried about adapting to the column-stagger, I've only used the regular row-stagger before, but after one hour of practice I was already typing at about half my normal speed, so I'm pretty happy.

I do feel that I need wrist rests though. not sure how to fix that yet.

I find that having a way to check the battery and connection status is very useful with wireless devices. Traditionally, the way to do this is through the addition of a display. However I always thought displays were a bit overkill for that and once I started using Xiao BLE controllers I noticed that they have an RGB LED built onto the controller itself that can be programmed.

So I wrote a small tool to indicate the battery and BT profile status that uses that LED, and I thought I'd share more broadly in case it is useful to others. It's pretty easy to add to your ZMK build as documented in the README as it is a ZMK module.

While it supports Seeeduino Xiao BLE out of the box, it's also easy to add support for it if you have a custom keyboard that has three dumb LEDs for RGB colors.

I like the glove80, but I don't want my keyboard to have any lights on it, and I want blank keycaps

I feel like I could find it for much cheaper without these things, but I also want it to have that instant actuation/deactuation found in certain gaming keyboards that makes the latency effectively tiny

Is there anything like this on the market? I can't find anything.

(sorry for poor image quality)

I wanted to create a new keyboard with tenting since I heard that its more comfortable and ergonomic. I originally tried stacking two phones in the middle but it was too short, and then thought "why not use my headphone amp"?

Using approximate measurements with a nearby measuring tape, the tenting angle is about 26 degrees which I think is close enough to the 30 degrees I wanted to know how nice it'd be.

The keyboard is my first custom mechanical keyboard, a Corne with Aqua Kings, and the amp is a Monolith Liquid Spark.

Im using my first mechanical keyboard and the experience has been great so far but, it is quite loud, especially at night, which cheap mods i can make to make it quieter while i can do something like changing the switches?

I'm trying to make myself a little Sweep clone with Ergogen. I'm following the amazing flatfootfox guide, but the guide doesn't talk about how to make a board flippable. I also watched the Ban Vallack videos and he kinda mentioned it but it didn't really go in depth. Are there some resources on what to keep in mind when making a board flippable/repositories for flippable footprints?

It's summer and it's hot.

Prime Day wasn't that great.

Things are a little weird.

So, we're having a Basically OK Sale in support of just being basically OK!

Get 15% off any order of $100 or more with checkout code YES-I-AM-BASICALLY-OK. Sale ends at midnight, July 31st.

Our keyboards are a bit more than Basically OK, of course. They're premium builds with gorgeous acrylic-coated resin cases, silky smooth trackballs and hot-swappable switches, with options like full wireless support, cool screens, scroll wheels, and RGB. (Haptic support is coming, too!)

Full Dactyl Manuform Builds (both wired and wireless)

DIY Dactyl Manuform Build Kit

Resin Dactyl Manuform Case Prints

PLA Dactyl Manuform Case Prints

If you'd like to try a Dactyl Manuform case on for size, we sell "sizing prints" of our C stock keyboard cases so you can actually try a case in hand to gauge how it feels.

Sizing Prints

And feel free to reach out if you have questions!

Cheers!

Andy @ Wylderbuilds

I created a short video on how to use the Latin extended/supplement characters (æ,ã,š,ß,ç, etc...) and how to pick other alternatives (sent via Unicode). High res version here: https://youtu.be/3h96KhmJhUs?si=rHAo-_tkZzZIPiie

My first ergo mech keyboard was a ZSA Moonlander which I got a little over a year ago. I love it. However, I am now being asked to come into the office more often and am looking at getting something similar, but more portable.

I was looking at the ZSA Voyager since the split keeb, low profile form factor, and columnar layout seem to check a lot of boxes, but I can't tell if I can go cut out that many keys/rows. Mostly concerned about losing the bottom row where I often hit CTRL, and losing out on the 3 thumbcluster buttons I always use.

Questions I have are:

1. Is it easy to switch from keyboard layouts that have dedicated ctrl keys, vs long pressing?

2. If this is used for an office setup where the keyboard is going to basically be straddling my laptop keyboard, do folks often just dance between the split keyboard to the laptop keyboard for those extra keys or muscle memory chords?

3. Are there low profile split type keyboards I should be considering?

4. If I like U4Ts, what type of switches should I be looking at for low profile tactiles but not too thocky and loud?

I'm looking for "fat"? keycaps similar to what Matias uses for Esc, Ctrl, Option, Cmd and Space keys on their ErgoPro.
What search term should I use to find similar keycaps? I've tried "tall", "fat", "oversized", "big", etc., but I only find extra wide (in the X direction) or extra tall (in the Z direction) rather than in the Y direction.
Any help welcome.

Discovered it yesterday in another thread.

This video looks amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aLmO97Y2Is

I had a look at the long-term review thread but couldn't find any comment for this one, so maybe this thread will be more successful?

I guess for me the biggest difference compared to a Charybdis is that it's a professional product.

I love the Charybdis as a project, but due to the price, I would rather go for something that can resist the test of time.

Using previous advice here I managed to assemble a piantor and soldered the microcontroller on the pcb directly and I have to say that for a complete beginner that was very challenging.

I've gotten 5 pairs of PCBs and I kind of destroyed one pair but I am still trying to assemble at least another keyboard so I have a backup as I reckon it would take me a few days to be able to be proficient again on a non ortholinear keyboard now.

So I decided to try to use the female pin headers to be able to remove the microcontroller if I ever need to in case it dies or something of the sort.

I had the regular pin headers already and I know I can remove the pins from the white strip so I was going to solder them into the pcb while attached to the female and cut the extra length they'd have.

I got this specific female ones from Aliexpress https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005053790061.html I got the ones named "1x40P Female Tin"

When they arrived however, I ended up noticing that the regular pin headers I have do not fit the female ones. I have no idea what to search for to buy just the pins and what dimensions I'd need to get them, can anyone please advise me on what's the name of the loose pins and which ones should I buy please.

Thanks in advance, thanks to this community I have a working kb now :)

I created this keyboard with the goal of having a display in each key. It has 72 keys and each key has a 72x40 px OLED display. They keys can change according to language and layout. Also displaying shortcut icons is possible :)

1137 days later it's finally here!!

I designed a small 30% keyboard based on hexagonal keycaps. The source files can be found on github. It runs the FAK firmware.

I am living in Germany and I need some Keycaps, which are not expensive. They don't need to be special, they just need to... work.

If you have been using an ergonomic mechanical keyboard for more than year, let us know which keyboard it is, and whether you plan to keep to keep using it for at least another year or if there's another keyboard you are considering trying instead.

Hello all,

After trying to find good choc v1 compatible keycaps, I found some STLs on GitHub for some Chicago Stenographer ones.

My 3D printer is just an A1 mini (can only print PLA and PETG - maybe TPU?). Do you think it’s a good idea to use PLA for keycaps?

Have MBKs right now on my Chocofi but was hoping for something more sculpted to get a little less fat finger typing.

I know most people order Nylon SLS prints from online but since I already have a 3D printer I was hoping to avoid that.

Bad idea?