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've got a number of vintage Apple Extended Keyboards that I've been wanting to modernize for ages, and one project I'd like to get off the ground is a conversion kit to modernize your Apple Extended Keyboard or Apple Extended Keyboard II (AFAIK they use the same sized PCB so I think they'd be interchangeable). The primary advantage I'm looking for in such a modernization would be adding native USB support as well as NKRO, but I'm also open to other features, like retaining one or more ADB ports so it can be used with original Apple hardware (in fact, ADB itself supports NKRO; the keyboard just lacked diodes as a money-saving measure), and also custom firmware support.
The catch: I know absolutely nothing about PCB design or getting things manufactured (I have done one of these conversions on one of my own keyboards, but it was a hand-wired job with a Teensy and it's a mess). But small-scale custom projects like this are exactly the kind of thing Massdrop does on a regular basis.
If I could drum up the interest here on Massdrop is it something that can actually be made a reality? Has this kind of thing been done?