Hey! I saw posts from here on my feed, and have been sucked in. Beautiful keyboards!
But, I’m a bit overwhelmed with options. If I want to get started with an EMK, what would you suggest?
I am comfortable with general soldering (though haven’t done surface-mount), so putting a kit together should be doable. I use a Dvorak keyboard layout, so would prefer a way to customize keycaps. But … I would prefer a kit that comes with everything (or at least a checklist), and doesn’t require me to figure out what components to order, to help ensure I have compatible parts.
Thanks for your suggestions!
First, I’d check out the wiki https://gitlab.com/ergomechkeyboards/wiki/-/wikis/useful-resources For a DIY kit, I would check to see what kits the vendors in your part of the world have available. You’ll usually need to buy switches and keycaps separately.
You’ll want to figure out how many keys you want. For this, I’d recommend reading about how people achieve a 36 key layout (3 keys for each finger, including 3 for each thumb, and an extra column for your index fingers) with techniques like home row mods and decide if going that small is right for you. This https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku/tree/master/docs/reference is one of the most popular 36 key layout. 36 is about the smallest you’ll get from a kit, though some brave souls go smaller or even much smaller. Here is a more extreme example of someone using a 16 key layout, though you’ll likely not find kits that small: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RN_4PQ0j1A
You’ll also want to decide wireless (comes with battery and harder to configure ZMK firmware) or wired (usually you’d use QMK firmware, which has some more user friendly ways to configure it and is a bit more mature). And whether you’ll go with MX switches and keycaps (more travel distance) or Choc switches and keycaps (less travel distance)… most boards will only support one or the other of these.
Thanks! I’ll also want to use this with both my home and work computers (Linux and Mac), but I imagine info on setting things up should be easy enough to find.
That shouldn’t be an issue. All the configuration lives on the keyboard itself (except for some specific not too common tools some people use that live on the OS and do some keystroke processing there which you can easily avoid). And you shouldn’t really need to do anything that is only Linux or only Mac compatible any more than any other keyboard.
Because you plan to travel with it, if you go wireless, you may want figure out how to add a power switch which is an uncommon feature for kits to offer. Its really only needed for wireless that also get thrown into bag because if buttons get hit in your bag it’ll keep it awake draining your battery and also potentially sending random keystrokes to the computer in is connected to.