I wanted to show off an ergonomic keyboard generator I’ve been working on for several months. You can find more information about it here: ryanis.cool/cosmos. If you’ve used my dactyl generator may have already seen it, but for those who aren’t familiar, I’m building Cosmos with the goal of making it easier to design and...
Are you wanting to build one or just being helpful for those that might want to make one?
I have a few spare PCBs of the posted iteration, if you’re based in Australia I’m happy to send some on. Though I’d recommend waiting for the 1.0 release.
It’ll be much more of an at home board than one you can shove in a backpack. But I figure why not make an all you can eat board too.
I don’t anticipate having the prototypes even until December though as I’ve got a fair bit of work happening at the moment. In practical terms I guess that means no publicly available designs until early next year.
Yes. It’s fairly straight forward and there are test points to check everything is soldered properly as you go.
There is one exception, the backlight has some very small surface mount parts, the SMD resistors in particular are quite fiddly.
My current thinking is to sell pre-soldered kits with all the surface mount parts done (LEDs withstanding). This way people only need to solder the controller sockets and encoders to get a functioning keyboard.
I will of course keep all of the design files freely available. If you order your own PCBs from JLCPCB you will need to order a batch of 5 so you’ll have some practice boards 😊
I’m still working on a cost effective way to solve the pre-soldering of LEDs. I’ve looked into reverse mountable LEDs, but I’ve yet to find something that meets the required criteria (price, color, efficiency and availability).
Index fingers, though you can use thumbs but that felt quite clumsy to me.
In the base layer they act as arrow keys. In the functions layer they are volume and zoom.
I’ve found the arrow key scrolling to be quite nice. It takes a little getting used to, but once you’re used to it regular arrow keys for text navigation feel clunky.
I hear you, it’s a slightly bigger stretch, but on the other hand habits are hard to break. Also, if you’re a gamer I could definitely see the dedicated number row as a hard requirement, particularly if you’re not comfortable making custom layouts.
I still use a qwerty layout and have a number row in my numbers layer as it requires less re-training.
I suspect that layouts with a dedicated number row are a transitional form for most people that stick with it, I quickly moved away from the Sofle for example. As before though I can understand the desire for something different.
I am possibly the worst person to ask. I got a soldering iron for my 9th birthday.
But, I suppose practice, like anything. Watch a bunch of YouTube videos for beginners, get some practice boards (you can buy PCBs with a bunch of “junk parts”) to practice the skill. Also, get a decent soldering iron, I use a TS101, but apparently the Pinecil is good too. A bad soldering iron or bad solder are a disaster waiting to happen. Soldering is fairly easy to pick up until you get to the really tiny surface mount stuff (0805 and smaller). Most boards do not require that kind of soldering.
Typeractive sell some wireless Corne kits that I believe have most parts pre-soldered.
If you were is Australia I could sell you a wireless Corne with a travel case for parts cost (I don’t use it)… sadly you are not but you may find something on eBay??..…
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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