Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
If you're looking into buying a kit to make your own number pad, the soldering work is not that hard. Most kits you can find will have a guide on assembly, and you're only soldering 4 kinds of things to a PCB- the single microcontroller(which should come with the usb adapter), switches and LEDs.
The switches and LEDs only have 2 prongs each, and you can buy things called "holtites" that slot into the holes on the PCB that make your board "hot-swappable"(AKA you don't have to solder the switches and LEDs, they'll plug into the holtites and work.
The only annoying thing will be the 4th item you have to solder- resistors for the LEDs. Some boards like the Fenix are really easy to see (https://unikeyboard.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/felix-mf-1.png) where you need to solder, others are not as good with the layout.
Edit: A really cheap kit, if you're interested in doing this yourself. It doesn't come with switches/keycaps/switch LEDs, so you'd have to get those yourself. https://goo.gl/PNnCgx