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 have finished my small DIY project with this switch I mentioned earlier. I chose not to wait to get the switch from Massdrop, but directly purchased from Novel Keys themselves.
I laid out a 6cm*6cm PCB for the big switch, used a pro micro as the controller and put 4 WS2812B RGB LEDs onto the board, as well as a small push button to control the light. It was not easy soldering the SMD LEDs by hand when I don't have access to a small tip soldering iron, but thankfully managed to do that without a major failure.
(The lay out is ugly, for a board like this I just used auto routing)
Here's a picture of how the PCB fit, before I put the components on there
I chose qmk as the base for the firmware, and wrote a set of configs for a two key keyboard, compiled them with msys2 on my PC and flashed it into the pro micro, and...... It works!
And that was my small project, hope you'll find it a little interesting. Let me know if you are doing something similar and need help or whatsoever.
The RGB is set to loop between colors in a smooth fashion, here are some more pictures