How do you know if it's ergo "enough"

• awesome-mechanical-keyboard

  42 2,781 6.2 Astro

  ⌨️ A curated list of Open Source Mechanical Keyboard resources.

  

I'm in the middle of designing my own ergonomic split keyboard. The way I do it is to put my hand over a sheet of paper and curl up my fingers like I would if I were to use a keyboard efficiently, then I draw where the fingers are in the home position. I check the location where my thumb is most relaxed as that will be the location for the spacebar (on one hand). Then I check and draw in the arc of my thumb as it moves with little or no strain and mark off the other thumb keys that will be comfortable to use. (My thumb can with relative ease cover 4 keys from under my middle finger and out, but not as far out as e.g. the Moonlander). Next I check where I can most comfortably move my pinky, which seems to be in a diamond shape. Next, can I move the middle finger both 1 key up and 1 down or should I go for 2 keys for the ring finger and therefore shift the column a bit? For the index finger I also check what stagger the second (inner) index column needs, and I can only comfortably hit 2 of those so I focus on getting good positions for them. I then draw the location of the keys with the amazing ergogen software, and printed it first on paper to test. Next I bought some sample choc key switches and I use their footprint in ergogen, exported to kicad pcb and made a color printout. I cellotaped the printout to about 3mm of cardboard and made through holes with a pin and mounted the keys and tested a real physical model. To get mm precision I needed to do one iteration as the tenting and height of the keys will affect what's most comfortable. This is where I am at right now. I still need to draw the rest of the PCB. From my second iteration I can see that there are a few keyboards that closely match my thumbfan position, but only 1 that has a vaguely similar pinky cluster. Since I also want low profile keys it looks like the best option is to continue to make my own design. But if you are in luck and you know what you're looking for you might be able to find something that closely matches your specs in a previous design. There is a pretty large list here https://github.com/BenRoe/awesome-mechanical-keyboard/blob/master/docs/README.md GL

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