Just got my Ambient Twilight silent choc switches in! These switches feel incredible. I’d been running tape/floss modded Red Pros up until now. Their sound is similar depending on how well you did the mod, but they always felt disappointingly mushy. The Twilights are even quieter and have a nice satisfying linear feel. They’re definitely quiet enough to start bringing to the office more regularly.

The keyboard’s a variant to last year’s TypeBoy. A pair of modded Game Boy Advance cartridges house a custom PCB, XAIO BLE, shift register, and Sharp Memory Display. (When you don’t accidentally crack one during installation. Whoops.) The Mark II trades the staggered column setup for an ortholinear layout with an offset mod row. The new shape helps channel the handheld vibes a bit better. I went with a PCB stack this time for the case. Partially to try something new, partially to hide the bright Pro Red switches. I’ll have to let the Twilights shine a bit more on the next revision.

I love my Sofle and have had little desire to move down to fewer keys. If I ever get that itch, I can always pop my number row off for a week and see how well I get by.

Looks great! Love those wooden rests!

https://www.serverbuilds.net/ is a popular website online for folks building NASes at home. They’re fans of Unraid as well. They’ve got a Discord if you’re looking for something more interactive. Worth checking out. 👍

Looks nice. A good expensive low-pro for folks who want to go all in without much tinkering or soldering. The thumbs and mods are a little baffling though. If you’re going to include a number row, why not go full maximalist and add a few extra modifiers and make it a traditional 56/58 key layout like the Lily or Sofle? It might look different hands on, but that thumb also seems really far out.

Did you design a schematic or define nets using something like Ergogen? Schematics/Nets provide you with those little white lines defining, “These two pins should connect on the same circuit.” After you’ve traces all the routes to connect your components together, DRC will tell you if you missed a connection, or if two things are connected that shouldn’t be. It’ll also give you warnings like traces being too close to the edge of the board.

Thanks! It’s Inland’s Purple PLA. https://a.co/d/8ImXXVE Ironically I had a spool of it from a year or two ago. It just happened to match the keycaps well.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a nicely spaced out PCB in KiCAD, only to have the real thing show up in the mail and show you just how close 0.5mm pins with a 0.5mm pitch really are. I’m really happy with how it all came together in the end though!

This keyboard looks great! I love the keycaps you went with here. There’s always something you can tweak next time, but this looks like a really nice first board!

The RP2040 Zero has 20 pins on it and can fit some pretty large matrixes. It looks like they used a pair of shift registers on the XIAO build to get some extra column pins.

When you say without the ergo split thing, are you looking for something that’s “row staggered” like Keeb.io’s new Cepstrum? https://keeb.io/collections/cepstrum/products/cepstrum-keyboard-pre-built It’s a more traditional 65% build, but still split.

Or are you just looking for something Corne-like and ergo, but as a unibody build? The Reviung41 LP rings some bells. https://mkultra.click/reviung41-lp-low-profile-keyboard-kit/

It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.

It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.

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Ah, sorry, just saw your post update. I thought you were working with a PCB with an encoder footprint. Unfortunately I don’t have much experience adding an encoder to a non-encoder board.

Are you trying to make a hotswap encoder or something? The two big pins on the sides are mounting pins. Just solder those bad boys down and you should be good to go.

I had a batch of custom keycaps come in from FK Custom, so I decided to do a quick side-by-side comparison with them. Don’t forget, their custom keycap contest is still going on for another week or so!