ErgoMechKeyboards
Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards
Rules
Keep it ergo
Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)
i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²
¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid
No Spam
No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.
No Buy/Sell/Trade
This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.
Some useful links
- EMK wiki
- Split keyboard compare tool
- Compare keycap profiles Looking for another set of keycaps - check this site to compare the different keycap profiles https://www.keycaps.info/
- Keymap database A database with all kinds of keymap layouts - some of them fits ergo keyboards - get inspired https://keymapdb.com/
view the rest of the comments
I don't think it's meaningfully easier to build a wireless board, since you have to deal with batteries and (preferably) power switches. It's also more expensive to get two nice!nanos and batteries (although there are some other wireless controllers available now, some of which are probably cheaper).
ZMK, the firmware used for most wireless builds, is pretty different in its workflow from QMK. It's great, but there's not as much documentation and it is indeed harder to troubleshoot as the error messages on builds are less informative.
Re: how to connect batteries, it depends, but if you're doing a fully handwired build, you you can just wire the battery directly to the controller. A power switch between the controller and the battery will help a ton if you ever need to transport the board, since there's no soft lockout in ZMK.
Re: sourcing a battery, there's a type of very small lipo battery that is often sold together with the nice!nano by vendors. Those work fine if you don't need any power-hungry features like lighting or a screen. You can get bigger equivalents of those batteries in a huge range of sizes as well, if you want. You can source them from lots of places.
Shouldn't be a compatibility issue, any MX switch should work. One thing to watch out for though would be, for 3d printed builds, using switches that were out of spec in terms of housing size. Some switches are a little bigger or smaller than others.
IMO nice!nano is not nice for its price. I can say, more and more new board designs are going to use seeed studio xiao ble. I had been using an xiao ble module for a minipad with trackball on ZMK and some code from internet for the optical sensor. the quality of radio connectivity and battery life is not worse than n!n.