This is the right half of my first custom design. Not available yet as its still in prototyping phase.
Features:
- Fully wireless, running ZMK
- Case with fixed tenting angle (not shown in the picture as I am currently designing it)
- Provides space for large battery
- Bottom-facing MCU, here a Seeed Studio Xiao
- Reduced pinky keys
- extra keys below middle finger column and next to inner column
- thumb keys aligned with grid (for me, this was the most comfortable position anyways, your mileage may vary)
Basically a 42 (-2) keyboard: One pinky key less and the 6th column has been moved to more ergonomic positions (no pinky stretching or hand bending outwards)
Pic shows the right half with MBK Legends keycaps along some custom keycaps made with FKCaps’ custom keycaps generator. I am using a slightly modified Colemak-DH layout where I Q and Z to the left and all punctuation to layers so the left pinky only has to operate a homerow key (and caps word / num lock).
Dipping the fingers in dyed water and laying them on a piece of paper, measuring, printing and checking on the printed sheet.
It appears to me now that this method does not acknowledge how well your fingers are able to find their home row key while typing, or that the optimal stagger might be different for different tenting angles. Would strongly recommend to 3D print / laser cut the PCB design first and trying it out with actual switches beforehand.
I will do this for the next iteration before designing the case, and also look at some popular keyboards with a more aggressive stagger for hints. Will definitely reduce the middle finger column stagger as it is way too aggressive right now.
For some columns I slightly deviated from measurements deliberately, e.g. the inner column should be slightly lower than the index column, but it’s a minor difference.