So I made a keyboard#

If y’all follow me on the fediverse, you’ll have seen a couple of posts I made about making a split keyboard. It’s been finished, as shown in this image:

“A picture of a split mechanical keyboard with the halves connected by a TRRS (Tip-Ring-Ring-Sleeve) cable, which is usually used to plug audio devices into outputs (like headphones). The layout is mostly standard QWERTY, with the semicolon and apostrophe keys switched. The keyboard has no case, and is just a bare PCB”)

It was definitely an experience, and I did do some things I wish I’d done differently, but in all it went well!

The Good#

The keyboard did come out well, and fully functional in the end! I also have some spare circuit boards for if I ever want to make another keyboard for someone else, or if I want to do something with them afterwards. My room mate does want one set up, so they mady see some use sooner rather than later.

Besides that I did get to learn how to solder, which is surprisingly not as difficult as I expected it to be.

It’s also definitely making me learn how to touch type, which is something I’ve wanted to learn for a solid chunk of my life. The main issue I’ve had doing it is that the standard stagger of the keys makes it really hard for me to actually do that, because my muscle memory definitely said the B key was for my right hand to hit, not my left.

It’s also a fully hotswappable keyboard, which is part of why I decided to do this in the first place. My old keyboard was about 7 years old, and was starting to double type some keys, and it wasn’t hotswap so I’d have to solder it anyway.

It’s also nice to be able to set up the mouse in between the keyboard halves to keep my hand at shoulder width while typing. Feels a lot better, although using the mouse feels weirder as I do kind of have to angle it to use it right. But that feels less weird with a trackball than with a regular mouse, so meh.

The Bad#

By the gods, soldering microcontrollers is a pain, and de-soldering them is even worse. I’m very glad I got a pack of 3 instead of just grabbing the 2 I needed, because desoldering them is usually either awful, or destructive, and I went destructive. I ended up soldering in the controller for the right side upside down. Well, right side up. It was supposed to be soldered in upside down, and I soldered it in rightside-up.

Also after switching my wpm ended up going to 15 from where I was at 90-110. I’m back up to about 70 now, at least the last time I checked on QWERTY, however I am working on switching to Canary for typing purposes. QWERTY is still the standard, so a lot of the time it’s going to be easier to use for general web use and gaming.

Speaking of which, it’s kind of annoying that a lot of games don’t auto-detect keyboard layout and adjust it. I found out this is true even with standard international layouts like AZERTY. So with that even if I do switch to another layout to use for typing, I’ll still have to end up keeping a qwerty layout on standby to use for things like playing video or gaming. Not too butthurt about it, and I could feasibly just switch the needed keys around, since most of them are just left-hand keys.

Also did you know that there are 4 different kinds of aux cables? Cuz I didn’t when I grabbed the wrong one. I grabbed a 3 pin TRS connector instead of a 4 pin TRRS connector. Whoops.

The Ugly#

I may like the caseless look, but I gotta admit the keycaps are just… not great for the purpose. They’re fine on regular keyboards, but I’m still thinking of getting blanks caps to make them look a lot cleaner in terms of spacing, as I didn’t have all of the 1.5/1.25/2U keys I needed to make the keyboard look right.

## The Source

If you want to build this yourself, the keyboard can be found here on github. It cost me about $140 US to build, not including the mistakes made.