Custom Keyboard Programming Capabilities

Learning and discussion
21

Sorry, I didn’t think of this as related to tapdance. (I always thought of tapdance as “send a different key when tapped 2x or 3x”, not “send a different key for tap vs hold”.)

The existence of this feature in QMK is what’s broken the Model M for me. Now whenever I use a Model M, I want to hold the spacebar and hit J for down arrow, and instead it just sends a space and a J key. Or tap CapsLock for Esc, and then … well, you get the idea.

One of these days, if someone else doesn’t make it for me, I’m gonna make a new logic board for the Model M that runs QMK. (I did this once before, but the firmware was not QMK, it was some hack job I did to an open-source firmware I found. QMK is much better.)

Nah, that’d have to be the Datahand, the one they used in the movie Contact. (But mine definitely feels kind of futuristic.)

Yup. I went through a few myself (including a brand-new Unicomp that I managed to break within the first year of ownership).

Heh. You should check out that link to my Model M project from a few years back. I found a Terminal SSK and discovered that my crazy new logic board worked perfectly. Managed to find a steal on eBay - a dude had 8 of them, and was selling them for $25 each, because they were the Terminal variant and “useless with a PC”. I wish I had locked down all of them when I found it, but I ended up with 4 of them. Still used one up until the past two or three years, when I got seriously into custom keyboards.

To be fair, you can do this on ANY size keyboard. But once you cluster all of your necessary inputs into the keys at the center of the board, you start to realize you don’t need THAT many after all… or at least, that’s what happened to me.

Yeah, QMK has been around for years and the quality is pretty good in my experience. The keyboards I use every day all run QMK, and the keyboards that I don’t use anymore, I mostly don’t use because they lack QMK.

This is not a thing you should worry about at all. Worst-case, nobody keeps developing QMK, and you can still keep customizing your keymaps and using it with the features it has forever. But there are so many of us with the skills and interest and desire to improve it that I don’t think it’ll die as long as custom keyboards exist.

22

Thanks Nick. Between yours and @Lesbian’s input, any reservations about building a custom has been erased.

Your split board…hand wired? Custom created PCB? Something else? A split board may help my wrist and I’ve looked at them as well. But it would be a lot easier to poke around this entire concept at 100.00 to 150.00 per board compared 300.00 to 400.00 per board. At those dollars, I need to be more focused initially to prevent from winding up with a 5 board collection before finding my solution. Really don’t want to do that.

Model M SSK’s for 25.00? WOW! A working SSK for a couple hundred? Even that works.

SSK controlled with QMK? The Holy Grail for sure.

Yes I had a Unicomp years ago. I was lucky though…got about 5 years out of it.

An SSK on QMK? Damn…how nice would that be? I can dream.

23

My split board is a CRKBD/Helidox from keyhive.xyz. If you want to build one, it is a lot cheaper than $100.

However, if you’re just getting started, jumping straight to a CRKBD might be a little ambitious. You may want to try building something like the Iris first, which has an additional row of keys on each half, and should feel slightly less claustrophobic coming from full-size boards.

The Iris also requires a lot less soldering; you have to solder each diode and hotswap socket to the CRKBD as well as the Pro Micro (or compatible) controller, at a minimum, and I believe you only have to solder switches on the Iris. Basically, all you need to get an Iris working is a soldering station, the Iris v3 PCB kit, some key switches and key caps, a case, and a TRRS cable to connect the two halves together. If you’ve never soldered before, the Iris is going to be a much gentler introduction to the process.

The main downside of the Iris, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t support the Kailh hotswap keyswitch sockets like the CRKBD does. There are some MillMax sockets which could work, but you’ll probably have the best luck soldering your keyswitches directly to the PCB.

All that said, if you just want to jump straight into the deep end, I absolutely love my CRKBD and I’m sure there’s a bunch of people in this community who would all be happy to help you along your build process.

Someone else actually DID come up with a QMK-capable logic board for the Model M - it was called the Colossus, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with the creator and I haven’t found any evidence that the design was open sourced or available for purchase except directly from him. So I’ll probably have to do it myself.

24

Thanks for the info. Just realized that yours and the Iris are Ortholinear. How difficult was that to adjust to?

Fairly confident I could pull off the soldering although I have very little experience. In fact that’s sort of where this build your own started. A monitor I had purchased years ago (spent small fortune on it) had been sitting on the shelf because it just died one day. Didn’t have the heart to toss it. Figured it was capacitors based on what I had read. Had never done any soldering.

So I just decided to buy a soldering kit one day and give it a shot. To say I was shocked when I fixed this thing would be an understatement. But…a few capacitors certainly isn’t a couple hundred solder points that’s for sure. I’m going to poke around a little more to decide what to do.

I wish I could just grab a saw and turn my M into a 60-65%. That Colossus project is interesting. In fact Soarer is the adapter I had to buy for the Terminal M. It’s nice to know the CRKBD community is strong in case I decide to take that path.

25

Kinda! I think ortholinear implies a strictly non-staggered grid, and both the CRKBD and the Iris are actually vertically-staggered. (Traditional layouts, like the Model M, are horizontally-staggered.)

The hardest thing for me was unlearning bad typing habits. I thought that, because I type at an average of about 130-140wpm, my typing habits were good… but it turns out I used to hit the C key an awful lot with my left index finger instead of my middle finger. Took about a week before I stopped hitting V when I meant C every time, and maybe a full month before I stopped making the mistake at all.

Yeah. If I had to rate soldering difficulty on a scale of 1-10, the Iris is a 3 and the CRKBD is a 7 to 9 depending on whether you decide to go for the optional OLED display and the LED underlighting. Soldering the LEDs is challenging the first time for those of us who are pretty seasoned at this, so I would absolutely not recommend doing it on your first custom.

It’s been done, but I would not be willing to commit such violence against a perfectly good Model M.

26

Very cool and thank you for all your comments. They’ve helped a lot as have @Lesbian’s. With zero experience with programmable boards, and my focus seemingly going in 10 directions, I decided to get the ball rolling with a Kinesis Pro to begin thinking in programmable ideas and concepts. I’ve learned a lot in a short time frame.

For example any board I build will have a split space bar, whether the board is split or not. I never knew my left thumb never did any work and it’s a great key for FN. And as you know with function layers it’s easy to ditch the arrow keys…HJKL all over the place. It’s awesome! Also I suspect the elbow pain is from scrolling pages with the mouse wheel but not sure yet. Does QMK provide access to the cursor if it’s not focused on a page or window (clicked into something)? I’ve seen the mouse commands but they all seem to be once the cursor is active on a document.

27

Thanks Violet. Never would have thought there was so much to learn when it comes to keyboards.