deskthority

Hey there, I've been meaning to reply for the longest time, but I can't post while at work due to security restrictions they have set up there.

Anyways, regarding your latest post concerning layouts, my only concern is that you are starting to mimic the Matias half-keyboard: http://www.matias.ca ...

After being silly on two occassions, I've got mine working! :D

The first occassion was me not realizing that soldering on all the switches before the Teensy was not a good idea! Make sure you solder on the two switches that go beneath the Teensy, then the Teensy, then the rest of the switches! I ...

Looking back at your assembly instructions on the previous page, I suddenly realize how silly it to solder on all the switches before the Teensy, haha. Probably going to have to desolder some.

http://i.imgur.com/FFO0tY2.jpg

Assembled it except for the Teensy. I thought I had a Teensy laying around but it was a Teensy++ so I ordered a new one and am waiting for it to arrive.

I did a pretty terrible job of soldering though and I'm not even confident that all the solder joints are good ...

Now that we have correctly sized SHIFT and RETURN keys, could there maybe be a kit for ROUND4/SPH with just those three keys in BFP (blue, with white legends of course)?

You could probably get everyone who ordered ROUND4/SPH to buy one of those.

Hello again Matt3o! I've been in the hospital since the day after you were kind enough to make a DWG for my design! My right lung collapsed and they had me attached to some tubes to reinflate it and keep it that way. It was quite hard to breathe and there were times that I thought I was literally ...

7bit wrote:OK, I've found them (E I O) in a box under my box which had been delivered today.

That's good news.
Do I need to PM you about anything or will you just send them and SPH/SPACE (assuming you have a spare of this) when you can? I'm not in a hurry.

My SPH/COLEMAK is missing these three vowels: E I O
They should be row 3 profile (flat).
http://i.imgur.com/PiYRj3T.jpg

My SPH/SPACE was destroyed in the mail
http://i.imgur.com/j01TgwQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/27bMAGI.jpg

My RETRO/TKL and RETRO/COLEMAK are looking great though.
http://i ...

http://i.imgur.com/EeK4ON3.png

I've tried a vertical mouse, many trackballs and the rollermouse and, in the end, I think that my favorite of them all are the trackballs. However, one thing that annoys me about them is that most tend to have a base that forces you to tilt your wrist and fingers ...

I can sort of understand that for most people, page up and down are useful as dedicated keys for documents and web browsing and that most casual users don't use home or end ever.

Oh gosh, I just noticed that they don't use FN with the arrow keys to get home/end/page up/down...

Fn+Up = page up
Fn+Right = end (since end moves all the way to the right)

etc. That would have been so much better. :S

The right index finger that sits on J has U 1/4 staggered above it. That finger is also responsible for pressing Y. Y is already a bit of a stretch at 1 + 1/4 distance away. With 1/2 staggering it would be even further away. You can try what this would be like by putting your right index finger on M ...

Since you have a caps lock switch kit, could you add a caps lock sized backspace as well? I wouldn't have asked if you weren't replacing caps lock, but since you are and you're supporting Colemak in the extended alpha kit, it's worth mentioning that Colemak replaces caps lock with backspace, so it ...

The will come sorted in the way that all As of one colors are in one bag and all Bs of the same color in another etc.

That could be dangerous for non-Qwerty sets! For example, if the Qwertz layout Z is in the same bag as the Qwerty Z, they would have different profiles and it would be annoying to ...

it would be pretty cool to get a 87/104 set done with spherical profile. There is a set like that with 7bit's round 4, right?

Yea, there is. I bought one and that's why it would be awesome to have a spherical Vim key to go with it. I've been sort of looking out for one in the classifieds over in ...

I totally want that spherical Vim key.
I guess they have a bunch of stuff from old group buys just sitting around that we can't get our hands on!

@bpiphany
Very nice staggered keyboards. I used 0.25x stagger like you suggest in the ones I proposed for the HyperMicro size. I'd be pretty happy with a TKL or 60% using the layout you have, with maybe just a split spacebar added. Oh, and ANSI of course.

It would look more harmonic if ther would be a 1.5 units key in the middle, so space and back space can be 2.75 units keys.

http://i.imgur.com/NoaWW.png

I see what you mean, now the space/backspace/num lock keys follow the stagger of the rows above so it looks kind of nice. But I think that ...

Ok, I think this is the last change. I turned the space bar and backspace into 3x because there's no 3.5x and added the 1x key back between them.

http://i.imgur.com/BTM3e.png

It doesn't have to be num lock of course, but I think that since this keyboard doesn't have a number row, it would be ...

Err whoops, said totally the wrong thing there. The C400 and C600 use 0.25x staggering in both places is what I meant to say. And actually, when I first saw that, I thought it would be a pretty good thing. The only disadvantage that I see is that the N key, which is very common, is harder to reach ...

Would be great if we could offer a case. Only problem is that you are located in the US, so shipping might be a bit high for us Europeans.

Can you find out how much shipping would cost for one case to Europe?

...

OK, I will add the 4x13 option.

What is between Micro and Mini?

It costs $35 to ...

Just for comparison, I made the same bottom row changes to the other layout. Here's the two layouts next to each other, the first with normal staggering and the second with symmetric staggering.

Edit: actually... the top one isn't quite normal staggering. The second row is suppose to be 0.25x units ...

Here's another design that I'm sort of partial to, but I think that people would be less accepting of. Someone had mentioned symmetrical staggering before, so here's one at 0.25x unit staggering.

http://i.imgur.com/rkksR.png

I think it makes very good use of the space and has things located ...

Just did a little search about the left/right thumb for spacebar and found this nice sample of 204 people: http://www.overclock.net/t/1109489/do-you-hit-the-spacebar-with-your-right-or-left-thumb

I think that people using left thumb stems from usage of the mouse, where your right hand (since most ...

@Matias

Since it's programmable, you could switch space and backspace at your leisure. I would completely remove the circle to be honest, but I don't think they make 2.5x size keys... Might be worth looking into. I'd like to note though that my thumb happens to rest between C and V personally. I ...

I could possibly mass produce handmade aluminum cases for these as I did with Poker cases before. While not as fancy as some of the ones offered by other people, they're cheaper and can be made in high quantities. Also now that I've done it once I could try to make things a bit better this time ...

Any chance of adding the 4x13 layout I posted above to the interest check to see if people would want it? I think it has potential. I like the HyperMicro but I think that it's missing a few too many characters on the first layer to be usable without losing a fair amount of speed. One extra column ...

Alright, last idea. I added one column, so it's now 4x13, which makes it usable for Colemak and Dvorak people while still providing usefulness for Qwerty people and keeping it smaller than usual. Again, don't focus on where exactly everything is since the idea is that this is reprogrammable, just ...

Here's another idea without using the duplicated bottom right row. This arrangement allows for arrows on the first layer (and I added the `~ keys for European characters).

http://i.imgur.com/dx0s3.png EDIT: Image tags removed to reduce attention to this image, because there's other layouts I like ...

It's more to satisfy the people with RGBY kits or for people that favor the right instead of the left. However, it's reprogrammable, so this is just one suggested arrangement. It's the physical layout of the keys that's important though.

In particular, I could see someone setting the 1x key next to ...