I think a big thing is that good prebuilts are now readily available: hot swap, foam layers, PCB stabilizers, CNC aluminum cases, a mounting system more sophisticated than tray mount, decent firmware (often properly released QMK/VIA, but at least VIA), and fun features like lighting or encoders. A late as 2022, this would have been a wish list on an interest check for a $400+ kit; now it’s a baseline to charge three digits for a prebuilt MX board.

There are still many group buys going on at the high end (geek hack basically exists as an IC/GB publishing platform at this point), and a lot of boards are available bare bones, but when a newbie comes along for a recommendation, no one has to feel bad recommending some pre-built that would make a Pok3r look like a joke as a value proposition.

I mean, it helped that I knew the designer, LOL.

IIRC, there is one single bodge wire in there from where I did compromise the matrix, but I cannot stress how simplistic this PCB design was. It is holes for switches, holes for diodes, holes to string it over to the microcontroller dev board, and traces connecting them all. My second one is slightly more ambitious, allowing a couple of layout choices, Alps or MX, and has a designated spot to solder a specific MCU. That one requires two bodge wires because I screwed up the traces a little. If I do a third, I will know to make sure every trace is assigned to a “subnet” before I tell KiCAD to clean things up.

Very cool!! I think your bottom row may ultimately prove slightly more user friendly than mine, though I certainly got used to it. The ortholinear number row has proven to be a non-issue for me, though I have the “advantage” of not truly touch typing, and my hand-eye coordination therefore doesn’t have too much trouble with losing that 0.5u stagger.

DIY board. I designed a no-stabs matrix-only PCB (the Pi Pico MCU has to serve as the “daughterboard”). It’s FRL 1800 and is one of my personal favorites, though I’ve since replaced the black spacebars with a couple of BOW keys that reflect the hold-tap mapping I set up; I’ve also changed it from KMK to ZMK.

Anyway, PCB orders usually have a minimum order of 5 pieces, so I snapped the numpad off of one and laser-cut a case of sorts, really just plates and spacers, and got “half-height” switches. My laser can sort of half-assedly dye-sub cheap PBT blanks, so I did a Timex Sinclair design. Later, I added feet, a 3D printed replacement one-piece spacer with a sidewall, and a MagSafe ring so it could be the keyboard for a Chrometab I converted to Debian.

Then it’s a good thing the gang of four there are all 1.25u!

Which is not to say your decision is anything other than ourageous and unfair. We’ll see what the Supreme Chancellor thinks.

You rang?

I’m not sure if it’s close enough to work without mucking about, but I understand the Keychron Launcher is just a fork of VIA, which has an Electron app that basically containerizes the web app and makes it easier to have the right permissions.

I’d also suggest that if you’re not looking for any new features or having any issues or just an incorrigible tinkerer (guilty of this one myself), just leave the firmware be. As mentioned elsewhere though, if it’s QMK, the Linux QMK environment should have all the commands you need to flash the board.

This. The QMK environment flashing tools are generic and bundled for convenience, so they will work fine even with firmware files that aren’t QMK at all, so long as they’re for your keyboard or chipset. I use them to flash Soarer’s style firmwares on Tuxedo OS.

All with full 40s sets?

Oh, God no. Sorry! Mostly they’re on more normie boards, but the Mitospeed being R3 and full of nonsense legends would go well on a 40 or 40-adjacent.

I’ve reluctantly come to realize that I just don’t like the feel of Cherry all that much. I prefer DCS if I’m going to go cylindrical. The sharp edges on Cherry are just all wrong for my poor typing technique.

I got Tatooine, Oblivion (Hagoromo), Laser, and Mitospeed for some pretty steep discounts, as well as the DSS Honeywell from PrimeKB. My options for cheap but unused SP are quickly drying up though, lol.

Funny enough, the board I come back to most often is the first one I did on the no-stabs PCB (minimum order quanity is a burden to us all!), which has semi-sculpted Akko SA on it. When avoiding stabs, good 40s kitting is essential even if I also need a numpad.

SA Teletype is such a pretty set, and I really like SA R3, and the designer seems like a good guy. It was the one time I was seriously tempted to pay full price for “name brand” keycaps. I don’t even use 40s, but I had a layout rigged to adapt an existing no-stabs FRL 1800 PCB I designed a while back.

Excellent! And just so I don’t send you off on a wild goose chase, “Electron” is not the app’s name, just the platform (a browser wrapper, basically) that VIA uses for its desktop app. It’ll be on VIA’s github page, if not their main page. Glad you got it all squared away though. That’s a truly silly default keymap for what I understand is a super nice keyboard.

Just in case you’re still looking…

1. If you’re on Linux, don’t use the VIA web app, even if the build guide says to. Download the Electron app because it knows to ask for the right permissions and doesn’t apply them to everything you browse. In either event, make sure you grabbed the json to upload.
2. That strikes me as odd that there would be no arrows enabled at all. If you still can’t get into VIA go to some keyboard tester and try literally every key with and without Fn. It shouldn’t take too long for a 60%.

For the Epomaker, not bad at all. You can either futz with your privacy settings to let it work in a Chromium based browser, or simply download the contained VIA app. I dual boot, so I haven’t tried to install or run software from RK or Redragon or any of the other brands still using proprietary software. It might work, but honestly I am just not sure. If you do have to dig up a Windows PC, any changes you make should be stored on the keyboard itself and will be persistent across reboots. On the plus side, it isn’t so much the driver you have to be woriied about. It is just USB HID. The onyl issue is whetyher you’ll be able to remap keys and adjust lighting without resorting to whatever Fn+Key combos Royal Kludge builds in.

As I mentioned, Epomaker are no saints, and stories of their poor customer support are numerous. Buy from a third-party retailer (Amazon works well if you can stomach it) with a generous return policy and assume you’ll need to make a final decision by the time the return window closes. Beyond that, they just commission factories to do a run of a given board and re-badge it. Sometimes no one else does the same board, sometimes several someones do. They’re a glorified White Label, but that has the benefit that sometimes the hardware itself is quite nice.

For the switches, the same basic types still exist as with Cherry, but that market has exploded since their patent ran out. There’s still clicky (self explanatory), linear (smooth action on press), and tactile (a bump of some sort that requires extra pressure to overcome, but not intentionally noisy). There are also still multiple weights. The original Cherrys and clones are still around as a baseline: Red = Light-medium Linear; Brown = light-med Tactile; Blue = medium clicky. Heavier versions of each are Black, Clear, and Green, respectively. If the name of the switch is any more complicated than that (e.g. “Epomaker Wisteria,” or “Holy Panda” or the like), you need to parse the listing to see if it’s the type of switch you’d like. Switches also frequently come lubed from the factory these days, which can be nice for Linears and Tactiles.

I haven’t tried that board, but yeah, your options in that range are limited. I might consider instead the Epomaker Split65. You lose the macro keys but gain a knob and VIA. Neither RK nor Epomaker are particularly good citizens when it comes to respecting the QMK open source license, but the actual usability of the Epomaker on VIA is going to be better, and sometimes they contribute their firmware back. Low-end closed-source Keyboard software is generally quite bad.

Actual typing quality could be a deciding factor. To that end, I’ll happily let others weigh in. Worth noting to make sure you get switches you like, which may mean getting replacements. The RK seems to have “fast linears” (so early actuation point and often a fairly light spring) or Browns (tactile, and generally no better than “okay”), while the Epomaker has somewhat light linears (45g) or very light linears (45g).

It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”

Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.

The bliss theme, complete with activation notice, is very nifty, LOL.

You can extend the matrix across so it becomes one board, but it means custom wiring the connector.

Yeah, physically that will work. I should have mentioned that, as it’s what I did (permanently wired) on my failure of an ergo split to get it split at all with one MCU, but electrically it worked perfectly fine. Proper USB-C/Thunderbolt like the caravan 2 seems like it would be a good solution for a PCB, and I’m curious what issues the mini HDMI produced (crosstalk maybe, or just complaining about sourcing mini to mini cables?). Ethernet or DB9 should do for hand-wired, though obviously bulkier.

I will admit I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of a split keyboard that was viewed as one unit by the host device AND that had more than two parts. I don’t think the usual suspects for firmware will support that, though I could be wrong. That said, if you can live with more cords there’s no particular reason you couldn’t make it a split keyboard and two macro pads, or two split keyboards. To the computer, “keypresses is keypresses” for the most part. In any event, this could work out fine in several different approaches.

I’ll echo @junderwood@lemmy.world and say that I don’t believe there are any commercially available half-height keyboard switches with proper keycaps, though I’m sure there are various pushbutton switches that could give you the basic functionality. Still, I might write that one off for now.

For the layout, your stagger looks modest but fine; that’s very much a personal thing though, and I completely borked it on my first (and only) split board. One other thing I didn’t love about my split was having two vertical tiers of thumb keys. Thumbs are strong but short and move differently. Clearly it can work, but more often you’ll see the arc extended rather than stacking. In any event, I’d recommend at least printing up a full-size copy of the layout and seeing how your fingers will need to move to hit everything you’d like. It’s far short of a full mockup, but it would have a great value-to-effort ratio. :-)

For the numpad, I don’t know your use case but backslashes aren’t commonly used for math (right?) or data entry so I might move the dot/comma separator onto that group of four and park backslash somewhere else. The keymap beyond that should be fully programmable, so maybe just don’t spend big on custom keycaps until you’re sure you’ve settled in on something you like. A lot of people at !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world (and elsewhere) will use all blanks or blanks on the mods.