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
I just finished building my first custom keyboard and thought it would be cool to start a discussion page where we could all share our custom builds.
I joined Massdrop's Vortex backlit keycap drop a couple months ago and designed and built the keyboard while I waited for the caps to ship. I went with gateron brown switches, an acrylic case (with a steel backplate), blue LEDs, and a Teensy 3.2 microcontroller for my primary components. For some reason I though it would be fun to hand-wire all of the keycaps and LEDs, so I spent a couple days soldering resistors to LED's and trying to avoid creating shorts while putting together the switch matrix. (Next time I'm definitely going to use a PCB).
Here's a picture of the wiring before I added the LEDs
Here's a couple other pictures