Wow, this is so well done. I really appreciate the attention to detail and how you went the extra mile to really make it look good.

The bums will always lose, do you hear me Lebowski??

I say this as someone who’s fully in the weirdo zone, currently typing this from a 30-key board of my own invention with a strange layout: I don’t think going beyond something like a Microsoft Natural keyboard will do a whole lot for rsi. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and it does help! But realistically I think you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly.

In my experience, most bouts of typing pain that I’ve encountered in two decades as a professional software developer have ultimately been caused by myofascial issues in my arms, shoulders, and neck. The muscles in your upper back and neck can shoot pain, tingling, and numbness down your arms, hands, and fingers, far away from where the actual problem is. For example your scalene muscles in the base your neck, which can get tight from sitting with raised tense shoulders, can cause pain and numbness in your wrist, thumb, and index finger. Ditto with your infra- and supraspinatus muscles in your upper back. No amount of wacky layouts and homerow mods will correct that, but getting a deep tissue massage (or better yet, learning to do it yourself) will.

As nerdy people living in a consumer culture, I think it’s natural to want to search for a technical solution or a product to buy, and certainly having equipment that allows you to work in a comfortable and relaxed posture is important, but learning about the body and how to do some basic muscle maintenance will likely serve you better than waffling between 30g vs 35g springs in your switches.

Now that being said, I do have a messed up joint in one of my thumbs from a few too many skateboard crashes, and it does not bend in certain directions. Keyboards with very “tucky” thumb clusters or too heavy a spring on that switch are painful to use, and changing to a board that more naturally accommodates that injury absolutely does help.

I have successfully driven a chain of RGBs from a Xiao controller, although not running ZMK. One thing you could do is write a little Arduino program to just drive the RGBs, and that will let you isolate whether it’s the hardware or ZMK.

One easy thing to check on the hardware side: Are you running the power to the RGBs at 5v or 3.3V? The logic voltage of the Xiao is 3.3v, so you either need to power the RGBs from the 3.3v pin (out of spec but it will work fine, probably) or if you are powering the RGBs from 5v then you need to shift the voltage level of the data pin up from 3.3v to something closer to 5v. The RGBs compare the voltage on the data line to their power voltage to decide what’s a 1 vs 0 on the data line. 3.3v is low enough below 5v that the RGBs will interpret the digital signal as entirely 0s

Thank you very much! I sent you a PM

Thanks Hazel! The feeling is mutual, I’ve had your badwings boards bookmarked myself for a while now.

I think you’re spot on. I use Instagram for one niche sport I do, hydrofoil surfing. Everyone who foils is on there, and as a result the development speed of this 5-year-old sport is incredible. Someone in Australia invents a new maneuver, posts a video of it, and a few hours later while they’re sleeping people in America are trying it out.

None of that is happening on pixelfed. I tried it out too, and, meh. There’s just nothing interesting on there, and it’s too complicated to explain to non techies. So there’s a huge barrier to entry and no compelling reason to surmount it. Heck, I have an advanced degree in informatics and I barely made it over the choose an instance wall. My perma-stoned surfing buddies don’t stand a chance.

This is similar to how I learned Miryoku, I slowly migrated my TKL board over to it incrementally. First I dropped the number row and did a Planck-style layout, then once I was comfortable with that I added homerow mods to it, then once that felt good I did what you’ve done here. After those baby steps, I built a Fifi keyboard. I’ve been on Miryoku for about two years and am stoked on it (although I’ve recently adapted it down to 34 keys and like that better)

If I may be so bold, you may be thinking of my white-on-white Planck that I posted to Reddit a year or so ago, that I blanked with acrylic rectangles and double sided tape.

I have no trouble at all switching between my 34 key weirdo ergo board and my laptop. When I was first learning the ergo, I did, but once I’d mastered it, no problem.

That’s funny, I’ve made a few of these and always thought to myself, “I can knock this out with a hand plane way faster than I could set up my table saw.” A few swipes with a no5 and a couple swipes with a smoother and I’m done. I guess it all depends on how familiar you are with which tools (and of course, whether you’re making a couple vs a whole bunch)