Thankyou.

I’ve started assembling V1 today. Which means I can finish the mechanical design this week. I’m looking forwards to having it, I think it’s going to look very nice.

I expect once it’s at a “now it’s done” stage that might come up more.

Right now this is little more than a nice POC. I think the refined version will be quite a bit better…. And easier to make all going well.

Thanks. The loose assumptions are dead on.

Funnily enough after implementing the “math mode” I realised I’d made a gaming half board.

If you use szxc instead of wasd in math mode you have all your numbers still. The left side has a USB mode so you can avoid lag that come from BT (though that hasn’t been an issue for me). SZXC could easily be remapped to WASD on the firmware.

It got me to thinking whether I should tinker with a games mode…. But I don’t play enough PC games to have the right perspective for that. I suspect it’d be a very poor fit and more the kind of thing best left to people that like to make their own stuff to update the keymap who do a bit more of that than me.

Ah, sadly I don’t have this with ZMK, going wireless very much limits what can be done. I’d love to add a small trackball for example (PIM447 maybe) but the energy budget is a big factor.

Ah, yes, I did suspect this was muscle memory at work.

The stagger is very similar to that of a Sofle though, and, inline with goals it should hopefully be usable by other newcomers.

Thanks.

I took some hand measurements and this is what it came out with:

I didn’t add the splay, I started to add it, but decided that in practical terms it likely doesn’t make much difference but it made things quite unwieldy looking.

In practice I’ve found the pinky column needs to drop by about 3-4mm which is a change I have in the newest iteration.

Nice, I’m glad it resonates with you.

In a month or so I expect having a properly refined release.

No worries, you’re very welcome.

If you’d like I can share the V1.01 files to you too. The improvements are also electrical as well as mechanical (eg some caps to smooth out the rollers). Otherwise I anticipate publishing in about 4ish weeks time.

I’d love to see that.

I have a design I’m tinkering with as an idea that has two 5 way sticks. The actuation force is too high IMO, but I could not find a suitable digital switch.

Are you interfacing to the switch sticks using analog or do you have some nice low power digital solution?

This one does have a “math mode”, if the numbers layer key is double tapped it locks in the numbers and other “maths buttons” until the numbers layer key is tapped again.

Next I’d like to make a macro pad that has a ten key mode for “home use” with some big rotary encoders that matches the style of the Rolio (to be called Twistio).

That said, I am tempted to make a split with a number row (Rolio Max?). If I do that then there will be enough room for a 5 way stick below the roller encoder, I couldn’t fit that in this one. But this would be more for “fun” as I quite like the Corne after having used both the Sofle and Corne.

That said, it’ll need to be much later this year, I have a CNC machine on order. I’d not want to prototype something like this again without a CNC machine of my own. The process is a bit expensive, the controllers and displays are a bit pricey too IMO (though still good value given what goes into making them).

Thanks.

I think it’d be great if they started showing up on AliExpress.

It’s beautiful!

I really like this, nicely done 😊

That looks super clean.

How have you found the durability of the resin?

I’m hopefully sending some stuff off for manufacturing soon and I’ve been toying with a resin version as it greatly simplifies things for me, but I’m unsure it will be very resilient.

Thanks.

The time and cost exceeds any practical advantage, so, yeah, a little crazy is about right I guess.

Thanks.

I took hand measurements using the following:

https://pashutk.com/ergopad/

As it turns out the Corne is very close to my best layout.

I like the Corne, except it has no backlight, arrows are not very convenient (hence scrollers). I also move between Mac and windows, the extra modifiers on the Sofle make that easier.

In the end I’ve basically got a Sofle/Corne hybrid with scrollers and a backlight.

Glad to be of service. Check out the “lstart” and “lend” macros as a starting point for your single key to select a whole word thing.

I must admit I thought what I was doing here was pretty niche as I couldn’t find anything similar. Even the Bluetooth + Backlight seems a rarity. To be fair routing a 2 layer PCB with the added complexity was a PITA, soldering the resistors was super fiddly (either by hand or reflow).

The fact that it scratches an itch for you is pleasing, it means the added effort of open sourcing may be worth it as a few other people will get some value.

If the GUI key is tapped twice it switches to the windows base layer, double tap again and it goes to the Mac OS (default) layer. This is done using a “tap dance”, look for “td” in the map to find it.

If you look at the conditional layers you’ll see how I accomplished the stacking of key bindings.

Since the board is naked I’ve not really used it, but I was playing with the scrollers and doing text navigation, it was very very nice.

I think you can share layouts from FK Caps:

https://fkcaps.com/custom/HUA582

The above is my current WIP. Hopefully it works, I’d like to share it as a basis for people to customise the Rolio if they want.

Nice, I highly recommend the fk caps guys, really happy with them.

I have an updated set of caps that I’ll order soon, I’m currently tinkering with the backlight glyphs. Still not quite satisfied.

I like your caps idea, I toyed with dye sublimation but then decided against that (clear stickers would have been way easier). Then I saw a link to FK caps somewhere and gave it a go.

My encoders are mostly mapped to arrow keys. But, here’s the current map (it’s derived from my Corne’s map):

https://pastebin.com/9XRqkKYH

It’d be pretty easy for someone to take the design and make a more typical “naked” base plate etc.

I am having trouble getting the chassis to a point that I’m happy with the appearance. I also made some mistakes in the PCB edge cuts that make it harder again. All part of the learning process I guess.

Either way, once done I’d like for this to be at least as robust as any commercial product so that I can put it in a backpack easily/safely

Sharp memory display, it’s a bit like Epaper in terms of appearance. Most of the OLED panels I could find eat batteries.

More info here: https://nicekeyboards.com/nice-view/