If you’re allowed to have flash media, KMK as mentioned elsewhere just lives on the microcontroller as a python script, and the keymap is very human readable. I have made everything from a 4x3 macropad to a 102-key compact 1800 with it.

Don’t use previously-soldered switches in a hotswap, but otherwise it should be fine to unbend them. I use Outemu switches a lot and it just is what it is. They’re cheap, so the metal is thin and the packaging is minimal, but I really like some of them, like the dustproof green.

One thing to note is that hot-swaps were not really invented with an eye towards frequent switch changes, and can get pulled off the PCB with rough or constant changes, particularly when putting them in, or the internal contacts can get bent (lumps of old solder on switch legs are particularly bad for this). If it’s a pricy keyboard, I’d recommend installing switches with the PCB out of the board so you can support the socket from behind.

They might want to wait until winter to un box it, when that P4 can double as a space heater.

Found a slightly higher res version, but our Scandinavian(?) juggler friend here is tough to track down.

Very fair, but that wouldn’t make me significantly less confident in my guess, LOL. 700MB DVD rips fill up a turn of the century hard drive pretty quick. :-)

I’m guessing the plywood box with its three optical drives was their Linux home server/netflix ripper and is probably feeding that console output on the top monitor.

I definitely did not spend a bunch of time at a house full of engineers circa 2001 that had a similar setup…

I’m not actually left-handed, but a lot of people like the southpaw style to keep the num pad around and integrated, but allow the mouse to stay close to the right side of the keyboard. I’m not sure what I think of the concept so far, but it came out pretty well, given the constraints I gave myself.

Yep. Especially for a profile like cherry, this seems to work better. It also adds just that little bit of visual differentiation.

For a junk board made of cheap components and materials, it turned out really well!

I did exacltly that and made the 12-switch version of this for my daughter. As you note, a full size Pi Pico should have the 24 GPIO pins you need to avoid diodes.

For myself, I did a laser-cut numpad to use with the hand wired TKL-like I tend to use on my main PC. Then there are the others. I, uhh, may have a problem.

Ahh, I didn’t quite gather it was your github. Nice, nice work, certainly cleaner than mine, though mine are better than they used to be, at least for the matrix part; I still tend to let the kraken tentacles loose when wiring it to the MCU.

You gonna drop a handwired on us and not show the matrix?

Lovely board, by the way. I just never learned to properly touch type, though on a board I know and like I can compose text at 70ish wpm, which is enough to get by. And I am too old, yes, too old to begin the training.

How do you like the inverted Cherry keycaps as spacebars/thumb keys? I like to hand-wire compact 1800 boards with no stabilizers, and the next one is designed around a cheap set of Cherry. The kitting has no extra convex spacebars, and unlike XDA I don’t think I would get used to regular Cherry keys there, so I’m planning to adopt the upside down practice from ergos/40s for my “spacebar” cluster.

1. Nice job!
2. Tell me more about the ABS sheet. I haven’t looked into it as a source of stock.
3. A couple of 1.25u keys might be nice there to split the difference between 1 and 1.5.

Oh, the mechanical keyboard hobby has a rabbit hole for damn near every preference you’ve ever idly entertained for even a moment. There’s an antire category of boards “Alice or Arisu” that does a similar split, though only a few have any slope along the left-to-right axis.

Then here on lemmy there’s !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world which is a little corner of the ergo community. They are NOT fucking around with their typing devices.

KBt RE: 66

When you want OG Mac (and HHKB) on the left, but an 8u equivalent on the right.

What are we looking at for switches and keycaps?

If you leave off the amusing extra keys on the side of this one, the idea of “40%” boards (actual percentage of 104 keys varies) is to minimize finger movement while touch typing and to move lesser-used keys onto one or more Fn layers like laptops (or really most keyboards these days) have.

I don’t really touch type, so while I still like weird stuff (and make it myself), the 40s scene is a bit lost on me, though my very first hand-wired keyboard build was a “Planck” (somewhat similar to this but with the keys in a perfect grid) with three extra keys.

If you like numpads and don’t mind the slight tweaks from a 96% layout, the Keychron K17 Pro actually checks all your boxes (though QMK reprogramming usually only works on wired mode, once it’s sent to the board it should be persistent).

Don’t know why they haven’t plopped a knob down on one of their low profile TKL’s, actually. Keychron LOOOOVES new SKU’s.

Yeah, other than the bottom case being less dramatic, the V3 is pretty much the same board, aesthetically.

Are you seeking just low profile keycaps, or do you want the whole thing to be particularly low profile? The former is pretty easy to retrofit to any board that you like with the Womier XVX low profile sets being pretty decent and quite cheap.

To use? Sure, though I’m not sure it would be any better than an offbrand low-profile mechanical you might find for ten or fifteen bucks cheaper.

To configure beyond the default layout? No. Apart from a handful of models that have been ported to QMK by third parties, Redragon boards have to be configured or re-mapped in windows. I have an E-Yooso that’s a pcb-twin of a Redragon, and the RD software is fine but not very flexible and, as mentioned, windows only.

This is not to say it would be a bad board, far from it compared to an average cheapo membrane board, just that there’s not a lot of unique stuff going on with your average floating-keycap gamer board. I do find I personally don’t care for the choice to lose the 13 keys of the F-row in favor of ten rubber circles that do the same thing, only slightly worse. I am a fan of roller encoders versus standard vertical knobs, but IIRC the software may not let you customize the inevitable volume and lighting controls mapped to it.