I really love what Ben Vallack has done with the piano (featured in this video if you haven’t seen it). But I’m terrified of trying to learn such a small layout.
I think my ideal would be similarly just 2 thumbs on each side, and instead of 1222 like the piano, I’d want 23332. Anything like this out there?
The Hummingbird is a Unibody keyboard with a layout like you described
Mabroum has made a few boards with this sorta layout. They’ve opened sourced them and can be found at https://github.com/AlaaSaadAbdo/battoota
Oh sick that’s like exactly what I want lol. Now I just got to find a shop that sells these PCBs. Not really interested in spending the time to order them myself.
One thing worth remembering is that with any programmable keyboard you don’t need to actually use all the keys (and can even physically remove the switches if your board is hotswap).
You can see Ben did this himself to test out the layout with a modified version of his keyboard “the card” (looks like a different soldered board rather than hotswap: https://youtu.be/5RN_4PQ0j1A ) and again to demo his one button keyboard for the April fools video (with a one button version of the card—he must’ve had a ton of those PCBs laying around 😂).
So, if you want to try out his layout, you can do so without any worry by just taking any layout you think you’ll like, buying that, and flashing Ben’s layout to a subset of keys. A lot of the cost of a custom keyboard of this style is in the switches, keycaps, and microcontrollers (say 2/3 or 3/4 the cost depending), which if you make them all hotswap, you can keep reusing for many different layouts until you find one you want to stick with for a while.
All this is to say: there is a cost to get into the hobby, but experimenting after that point is pretty affordable!
My layout is designed for 30 keys, but two of them are completely replicated by combos, and the 4 alphas in the center columns are also replicated in the secondary alpha layer. What it means is that I can type with my layout using only 24 physical keys: 2 per thumb, 1 per pinkie and 3 for each of the other fingers. For the other layers, I still need the center columns, but it is a great releaf to be able to type any word without any finger stretch.
I’d thoroughly encourage making it yourself, it’s a fun process, plus you could use ErgoGen to make it even simpler. Ben also has good video tutorials on that.
Even without that though, small keyboards like this are really easy yet satisfying to design from scratch in kicad, you’d be able to get away with direct pin which means you don’t even have to place diodes, just place a controller, trrs and switches and route it up. Optionally also a power switch and battery terminals; and a reset button.
