Whereas smartphones and their touchscreens have swallowed up a big portion of the consumer enter market, many people nonetheless spend dozens of hours every week typing on keyboards. With that a lot time spent clicking and clacking the ol’ forbidden chiclets, you shortly be taught your keyboard has a big impression in your life and pleasure thereof. With that in thoughts, Fashionable Hobbyist constructed his personal customized mechanical keyboard just a few months in the past. However it wasn’t good and so he took the teachings he discovered from that and utilized them to make his dream keyboard known as Hermod.
Like the entire hottest fashions gracing the covers of PCMag points lately, it is a break up keyboard. Which means the keyboard is in two items, with one for every hand. In the event you imagine the preachings of break up keyboard evangelists, that could be a extra ergonomic association. It additionally has a columnar staggered format, which is one other bonus to ergonomics — in keeping with those that imagine it’s a bonus to ergonomics. Briefly, this could possibly be very ergonomic if you happen to like break up keyboard and columnar staggered layouts.
To construct it, Fashionable Hobbyist first needed to create a format for the Kailh Choc low profile mechanical key switches that he wished to make use of. For that, he turned to keyboard-layout-editor.com, which is a very helpful open-source internet app that may generate patterns for the entire well-liked (and unpopular) keyboard layouts and switches. With the KBPlacer plugin, it could actually spit out a swap format that you may then place instantly right into a KiCAD PCB file, which is what Fashionable Hobbyist did.
From there, designing the PCBs was a matter of including the opposite elements and routing traces. The opposite elements embody a 2.2” LCD on either side, magnetic Pogo connectors, USB-C ports, NeoPixel LEDs, an STM32 microcontroller, and the entire normal fine details, like diodes and capacitors. Fashionable Hobbyist had PCBWay producer these PCBs, then populated them himself. That required some difficult SMD soldering, however he pulled it off.
Hermod runs QMK firmware, which is at all times a preferred selection. He did should do plenty of tweaking to get the configuration working correctly along with his {hardware}, but it surely all labored out in the long run.
The case is a customized 3D-printable design and the keycaps are easy clean affairs with out legends. The RGB LED under-key lighting provides a little bit of stylistic aptitude and the LCD screens present the map for the present layer. And, as a pleasant closing contact, Hermod is expandable by means of modules that interface through these magnetic pogo connectors. So, Fashionable Hobbyist can simply add a 10-key or no matter else he wants when it’s handy.
The recordsdata to construct your personal Hermod can be found right here.
