Split ergonomic keyboard project

Dreadwyrm

14 Jan 2013, 21:42

hoggy wrote:Saw this on kbdmania...
Spoiler:
Image
http://www.kbdmania.net/xe/index.php?mi ... rl=5705699
I don't know, I don't really like the plain sandblasted aluminium look. I think the brushed surface looks cooler (like the pic bellow), but hopefully I may be able to brush the case myself. Right? :?

Image

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sordna

18 Jan 2013, 16:26

dirge wrote: What's everyone doing about keycaps? Still haven't sourced any for mine.
I plan to use keycaps from a Kinesis Advantage, but WASD is almost certain to produce a set, since he is even buying an Ergodox.

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ironman31

21 Jan 2013, 17:16

It will get that low. I still haven't bought my two. And there are at least a few others waiting to purchase

heuristicist

26 Jan 2013, 01:43

Are there any (concrete) plans for a labelled keycap GB? I'll go in on the blank ones barring other options (and at the current price on MD it isn't too bad), but I'd prefer labels, at least for the standard keys :\

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BugBuster

26 Jan 2013, 02:13

heuristicist wrote:Are there any (concrete) plans for a labelled keycap GB? I'll go in on the blank ones barring other options (and at the current price on MD it isn't too bad), but I'd prefer labels, at least for the standard keys :\
+1 for labeled DCS PBT caps.

bisl

26 Jan 2013, 07:55

I'd sign up for DCS with legended qwerty alphabet + numbers. I think the rest are highly moveable and subject to relocation, so maybe DCS-row appropriate blanks for the rest of the keys on the board.

Also, this might be a completely stupid question, but: if we had enough orders, you think we could get 1.5x keys on DCS rows 1, 3, 4, & 5? Or is there no magic in the world capable of this feat?

eviltobz

29 Jan 2013, 15:55

Sunspots wrote:
eviltobz wrote:...And it also got me learning colemak, so this is my slowest forum post ever!
Welcome to Colemak, my dear friend! You are in for a treat (well, maybe in a couple months from now).
Lol, it's pretty harsh at the moment. I churned through the learncolemak.com lessons over Friday and Saturday, switched my home pooters on Sunday & started using it at work today. I'm keeping qwerty on standby for emergencies, but I'm already appreciating how much more efficient the colemak finger motions are when I need to go back to qwerty, even if I'm damn slow and error prone at em so far.

bjarven

29 Jan 2013, 21:36

eviltobz wrote:
Sunspots wrote:
eviltobz wrote:...And it also got me learning colemak, so this is my slowest forum post ever!
Welcome to Colemak, my dear friend! You are in for a treat (well, maybe in a couple months from now).
Lol, it's pretty harsh at the moment. I churned through the learncolemak.com lessons over Friday and Saturday, switched my home pooters on Sunday & started using it at work today. I'm keeping qwerty on standby for emergencies, but I'm already appreciating how much more efficient the colemak finger motions are when I need to go back to qwerty, even if I'm damn slow and error prone at em so far.
I can recommend amphetype, add a good book to the sources and read it while typing it. And you get stats on your progression. That's how I have learned colemak in the last year. Colemak/kinesis/ergodox here too :)

eviltobz

30 Jan 2013, 10:44

bjarven wrote: I can recommend amphetype, add a good book to the sources and read it while typing it. And you get stats on your progression. That's how I have learned colemak in the last year. Colemak/kinesis/ergodox here too :)
Wow, that is a truly awesome idea. Thanks :)

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regack

02 Feb 2013, 16:17

dox wrote:and the phantom....
I'm getting sick of all the whining about massdrop and such by people that never offered to help the project/distribution or organize the group buy themselves.
Dox, just curious since you've had your prototype going for a while, how is the Shapeways printed case doing?

ic07

03 Feb 2013, 23:05

L!athus wrote:Something like the cool leaf :mrgreen:
I hadn't seen that before :) thanks. Not exactly though... tactile feedback is really important... I keep hoping that a gently tactile version of the TouchStream would come out some day, or something like that, but alas, lol, not yet. Till then, I'm trying to decide if putting Reds with blue O-Rings in my ergodoxen would be a good approximation...

L!athus

03 Feb 2013, 23:45

ic07 wrote:
L!athus wrote:Something like the cool leaf :mrgreen:
I hadn't seen that before :) thanks. Not exactly though... tactile feedback is really important... I keep hoping that a gently tactile version of the TouchStream would come out some day, or something like that, but alas, lol, not yet. Till then, I'm trying to decide if putting Reds with blue O-Rings in my ergodoxen would be a good approximation...
Since fingerworks is a subsidary of apple. Probably the future of their keyboards would be geared towards touch tactile. Your hopes might be realised by them, its apple so it may cost you a limp :mrgreen: , as iirc i have read abt some patents either submitted/granted on a tech site. But as far as my knowledge goes peizoelectric touch panels are still research in motion that provide tactility to touch base panels. E.g. Blackberry storm series.

Agreed tactile feedbacks is of an importance but i really fell in love with the feeling of typing on boobs. :lol: My red switches are waiting in the drawer to be happily married to ergodox board. Could a 70a roughly 1.5~1.7mm thick o-ring in theory simulate the effect you are after? It reduces the travel more without changing the switch feel by much.

dox

04 Feb 2013, 00:36

regack wrote:Dox, just curious since you've had your prototype going for a while, how is the Shapeways printed case doing?
The shapeways cases are holding fine! I use them everyday and couldn't be happier.

I'm done here. There is a lot of things that I want to do and arguing on the internet won't get me anywhere.

Time to move on...
Spoiler:
DataDox.JPG
DataDox.JPG (34.36 KiB) Viewed 6128 times

ic07

04 Feb 2013, 00:40

L!athus wrote:Since fingerworks is a subsidary of apple. Probably the future of their keyboards would be geared towards touch tactile.
I hope so! Be cool to see what they come up with, if they ever do, even if I do have to wait a while before getting one... :-)
L!athus wrote:Agreed tactile feedbacks is of an importance but i really fell in love with the feeling of typing on boobs. :lol: My red switches are waiting in the drawer to be happily married to ergodox board. Could a 70a roughly 1.5~1.7mm thick o-ring in theory simulate the effect you are after? It reduces the travel more without changing the switch feel by much.
Lol. I suppose I misspoke, since typing on something soft would provide exactly the kind of "tactile feedback" (i.e. just a simple way to know that your finger is in fact on a key, and that it has indeed pressed down) I'm looking for. This is my first experience with Cherry switches in general though, and right now I'm typing on Blues since that's all that was available on short notice when I needed them, so I'm still experimenting with combinations (on my WASD sampler kit, waiting for my massdrop kits), and thinking about stuff... I suppose what I'd want in an ideal world would be red-level resistance till 2mm activation, with a smooth exponential increase in resistance till an asymptote near 7mm or so. Is there place to get smallish quantities of thicker/softer O-Rings than WASD carries? If so, what might I look for?

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webwit
Wild Duck

04 Feb 2013, 00:45

Fingerworks isn't a subsidiary of apple. They were bought for the patents and are long dead. This is about the gesture technology currently used on iphones and ipads.

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gdaian

04 Feb 2013, 00:47

dox wrote:
Spoiler:
DataDox.JPG
Hnnnnggg;want! :o

ic07

04 Feb 2013, 00:50

gdaian wrote:
dox wrote:
Spoiler:
DataDox.JPG
Hnnnnggg;want! :o
Me too... lol.
webwit wrote:Fingerworks isn't a subsidiary of apple. They were bought for the patents and are long dead. This is about the gesture technology currently used on iphones and ipads.
O ya, I remember... But I still hope they'll do something with the touch-tactile typing research some day. There's been romours about such things for a while now.

Ian S

04 Feb 2013, 02:16

ic07 wrote:red-level resistance till 2mm activation, with a smooth exponential increase in resistance till an asymptote near 7mm or so. Is there place to get smallish quantities of thicker/softer O-Rings than WASD carries? If so, what might I look for?
Surely progressive springs is what we want. Not rubber.


I have two WASD rings on some of the keys as I wanted to cut the over travel to make a faster responding switch.

Tried combinations of the Blue, red and black O rings.

I'm surprised that no-one is making progressive springs that are like reds for 2mm then turn in to blacks or more (clears?).

I don't know if a double spring can be fitted, ie, a normal red one then a half length harder than black one. That may be detectable as the lower spring is hit into by the descending key.

Some thinking and testing might produce a suitable result. Why is no-one doing that? Not even Cherry?

It's surprising that they made the red springs that stay so soft to the end stop. Maybe progressives are a lot more expensive, and Cherry are in it for the money (profit) after all?

But car suspension springs are often progressive. So it's not like it's never been done.

I guess they'd have to be soft with a lot of coils that go coil bound at 2mm then harder spread out coils to the bottom.

Merijn

04 Feb 2013, 22:41

Could anybody recall what the price for a shapeways case would be?

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regack

04 Feb 2013, 22:51

$200-$250USD

You need 4 pieces, two tops and two bottoms... early on Dox posted a screeshot that showed one of the pieces being $47USD. Not sure the price of the other half. Couple of pages back there was a link to a blog where the author handwired up an ergodox, and I think he said the case was in that price range as well.

Edit - Here it is...
sordna wrote:I forget who, but there's a guy who built an ergodox without a PCB, by just building the matrix with wires (sort of like a maltron):
http://blog.fsck.com/2012/12/building-a ... art-1.html
http://blog.fsck.com/2012/12/building-a ... art-2.html
Edit 2 - I saw this link posted by Dox to his Shapeways account where you can see current pricing : http://www.shapeways.com/shops/Dox
Last edited by regack on 05 Feb 2013, 01:39, edited 1 time in total.

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The Demongolator
Contra Bonos Mores

06 Feb 2013, 00:32

Please continue discussion regarding the massdrop groupbuy here.

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gdaian

06 Feb 2013, 01:45

Trying to design my layout, I'm not sure how to exploit the thumb cluster. Any kinesis advantage users to help me? How accessible are the outermost 3 keys? Is it easy to press multiple keys with the thumb?

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sordna

06 Feb 2013, 02:14

If by outermost you mean Ctrl, Space/Backspace, and Enter/Delete, they are very accessible.
Alt and PgUp/Home, PgDown/End less so, but I still manage to press Ctrl+Alt with a single thumb pretty easily.

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sordna

06 Feb 2013, 02:21

The Demongolator wrote:Please continue discussion regarding the massdrop groupbuy here.
Thank you for splitting the thread!

Since it got moved, I'll just repeat a useful linx about the online ErgoDox layout configurator that allows you to create and save multilayer layouts, and generate the corresponding .hex firmware files:

https://www.massdrop.com/ext/ergodox/

AloisiusFauxly

06 Feb 2013, 03:02

Huh! What a good contribution to the project from MD. I've only seen screenshots of UIs from people on GH, so it's nice that there's an option people can use.

Although in Chrome I can't use shift+key combos. Ah well.

bisl

06 Feb 2013, 06:13

AloisiusFauxly wrote:in Chrome I can't use shift+key combos
Why can't you? Can't reach the keys or the keys don't do what you programmed them to do?

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gdaian

06 Feb 2013, 15:03

There's also an UI for the 80-key version: https://www.massdrop.com/ext/ergodox/?keys=80

Sordna, how comfortable is a ctrl-delete or a home-end simultaneous press?

For reference:
Image

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sordna

06 Feb 2013, 16:07

Oh, Ctrl+Delete or Home+End with the same thumb? Hard, especially since on the Kinesis the keys have different heights. Ctrl+Delete is especially bad because you end up pushing the Delete at the top, and there's no stabilizer. But you can use thumb and index finger to hit those 2 buttons simultaneously, that works well.
However I'm a an of using both hands whenever possible since multiple keypresses on the same hand rather strains the hand.

eviltobz

06 Feb 2013, 18:52

I got my first kinesis last week, so I'm no veteran user of 'em, but I love that thumb cluster, after applying my own modifications of course ;) I swap the big keys, so backspace & delete in that example and space & enter on the other hand. This makes my home position more central and better poised to use the other keys. home and end become ctrl and shift respectively, and again on the other hand with page up/down. I find it very easy to munge down both ctrl & shift together like this with the side of my thumb which is a common combo. alt and ctrl (home in the piccy) isn't so easy, but it just requires lifting my palms off the keyboard body a little so I can cleanly press down with my thumb tip where they meet. One handing ctrl, alt, delete is a mess, but as sordna says, the other hand can help you nicely with that, although that's generally a leaving or arriving at my pooter kind of requirement to lock or unlock it, so I often end up doing that one from standing, or not quite in a touch typing position at least.

AloisiusFauxly

06 Feb 2013, 23:37

bisl wrote:
AloisiusFauxly wrote:in Chrome I can't use shift+key combos
Why can't you? Can't reach the keys or the keys don't do what you programmed them to do?
I think it's just how the keypresses are handled in the UI. For example, I want to assign a colon (not a semi) to a key on layer 1. I click on the key, then press shift+semi, and I'm left with [LShift]. I'm guessing they just need to incorporate a better keypress library like Keypress.

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