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A Preview of the Finished Keyboard

2020-12-20T21:35

Last night I put on the key caps and got my first glimpse into how the finished keyboard will look, feel and sound.

Here are some photos.

top

key profile

front

predecessor (my current keyboard)

My first impressions were wow, it looks good. So much better than what I was expecting. I did think my current keyboard looks pretty good, but in comparison it's scrappy as hell.

But I did discover a few things I wish were different. The border between the keys and the case is too wide and to reach the F keys, it feels like you're reaching over the number keys. There should be a wider gap between the two rows or the F keys should be raised higher somehow.

The keycaps I'm using are Susuwatari¹. They're double-shot ABS caps inspired by vintage keyboards. You can read a bit about them on matt3o's blog².

The layout is inspired by Sun Type 3 for the pipe, backtick, backspace and control keys. The spacebar is narrow which came from the Filco Minila (my current keyboard is a heavily modified Minila). This one has a narrower space, with command to the left, and alt to the right. I use alt a lot for readline commands³ on the terminal and elsewhere using keybindings⁴ and Karabiner⁵. The bottom left-most key labelled 'super' actually sends my Tmux prefix. And the arrow keys on the bottom right are of course inspired by Vim or perhaps more accurately, the ADM-3A⁶.

The sound of this keyboard is louder, and the tone is deeper and more hollow than my current. This has Gateron Blue rather than Cherry Blue switches, the case is also bigger and isn't yet fully closed. They're both made from the same wood; Tasmanian Oak. I expect the sound to change more once it's all soldered and closed up.

All up, I think this keyboard will be better than my current one, so I'm not going to abandon it (which I did consider for longer than you might think), but I will eventually build another that addresses the shortcomings of this one. Before I build another, I should really use this for a while to be sure I know all the shortcomings.

The remaining jobs are:

Polish the paint.

Solder up the switches to the Teensy.

Finish the USB port mounting plate.

Make a base.

Program the Teensy.

And give it some rubber feet.

Oh, and I also tuned up the position of the stabilisers and those keys are now feeling much better. They still don't feel as good as the Costar stabilisers on my current keyboard, but with usage they should improve. I'm still undecided about whether I swap those keys for Greens or heaver springs. We'll see about that.

¹ Matt3o MT3 Susuwatari Keycaps

² About MT3 profile and /dev/tty set

³ Bindable Readline Commands

⁴ macOS Keybindings

⁵ Karabiner

⁶ Here is why vim uses hjkl keys as arrow keys

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