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'm a pianist, and pianists are often very particular about how musical keyboards feel. There doesn't appear to be a very large DIY community around it. Getting a digital keyboard to feel good has a lot of elements. It seems that it's very expensive to design and manufacture a music keyboard, let alone to do it modularly as the keyboard community has. I would expect it to require a lot of compromises that I wouldn't be willing to deal with except as a hobby project.
Synths, on the other hand, have a HUGE DIY community and that sometimes extends to making keyboards. But for me, it rarely seems worth it to fabricate a keyboard when a MIDI controller with MIDI cables or MIDI over USB can be had as cheaply as $50 or to have a really well done one for under $150.
I'd be more interested in modding an existing keyboard than I would creating my own from scratch.
I found this list of links related to diy instrument and synth making in case you're interested. https://sdiy.info/wiki/Online_resources
Having it feel exactly how you want and being able to use something you built yourself is a big part of the mechanical keyboard community.
I can definitely see it for MIDI controllers, but a piano has that smooth press and satisfying bottom-out that I don't think is possible to replicate easily. You also need to sense how hard the key is pressed and the only way keyboard switches could sense that is with something like hall effect and a polling rate that is high enough to detect how fast the key is pressed down.
The most common way to sense velocity is to have two switches at different levels and calculate the delta to see how fast it moves between them. This does require precision, though.