cantor VS STeMCell

There are a few things that are close: * The Cantor/Piantor: more aggressive stagger and slightly changed thumb cluster. * The Swept Corne: essentially a big sweep. * The Hillside 46/48: This comes in many forms which are very similar to what you are looking for. Essentially an extra aggressive stagger (and perhaps splayed) Corne with a bigger thumb cluster.

Depending on how comfortable you are ordering PCBs yourself, the Cantor (https://github.com/diepala/cantor ) or the Cheapino (https://github.com/tompi/cheapino ) might be a good starting point for getting into split keyboards, both are diodeless, so you only need to solder the switches and use relatively cheap microcontrollers

The Corne caught my eye first, but I ended up starting with a Cantor, which has more stagger, like OP's keyboard. It didn't work for me. The Corne works better for me.

cantor

Cantor by DiePala, Choc, diodeless, cheap “Black pill” mcu, requires two. Caseless/plateless. Pcb is reversible, but you’ll need trrs cable and Jack.

I have 2 hand-wired keyboards with cherry style switches, and I decided to build a Cantor (diodeless, Corne-like with more pinky stagger) to try a PCB build and the Kailh choc v1 switches for a first time.

several of the low-profile / Choc boards (ex. Cantor) go the plateless and caseless route with nothing more than rubber bumpers on the bottom of the PCB

Cantor – low profile

I ordered a pre-assembled STeMCell MCU. The dfu bootloader works, and I was able to flash the uf2 bootloader onto there, but i'm not sure how to put it into uf2 bootloader mode. When I power the MCU on while holding the BOOT0 button down, it goes back into dfu mode. Am I missing something?

in the meantime, we've been using stemcell controllers which don't have the same issue

And I do agree that ESD issues are often overblown, but since I gotten my hand on some STMCELL back when pro micros were hard to get , I had to think hard about esd protection as "This design does not have any fuse, esd protection or reverse voltage protection." https://github.com/megamind4089/STeMCell

stemcell, but you need to build it yourself.

Your promicro is not enough program memory(32kb) to use some animations, let's use another controller which have more program memory like stemcellhttps://github.com/megamind4089/STeMCell

The blackpill is not, but the bonsai c4 is, alongside the stemcell, if you're JLCPCB-wise

There are a few controllers that have the additional holes (puchi-c, goldfish, comet etc) not just the elite-c. StemCell is probably one of the more open ones and you can get them assembled at jlc I believe? https://github.com/megamind4089/STeMCell

STeMCell

https://github.com/megamind4089/STeMCell/tree/main/gerbers https://github.com/megamind4089/STeMCell/tree/main/bom