Personal keyboard design
PS: This is a living document, more information about the project will come as I keep working on it.After being in the hobby of keyboards for many years and having built multiple unique (and sometimes very bad) keyboards, I came to the conclusion that I should design and build my own personalized keyboard thats perfect for my needs. I had often seen people on my feed with gorgeous one of a kind keyboards in all sorts of formats with cool features and designs on them and I thought it would be a fun experience to do so myself. I had some experience with electronics and I am interested in both product design as well as keyboards so i figured this could be fun.
The Idea
I had previously played with the idea of building a keyboard similar to a full-size keyboard but ortholinear after I recieved a split ortholinear keyboard from a friend which i thoroughly enjoyed using before I managed to break the mini-usb plug on it. The idea ultimately did not go anywhere as I had neither the interest to design it or the energy or money to go through with it at the time. A few years later after seeing a few youtube videos on the topic, I decided that I once again wanted to design my own keyboard. This time however I had some experience with building and using a Gherkin 30% keyboard (read about the build process for that here). With the knowledge from this build I figured that I can probably design a similar keyboard PCB without having to have the processor integrated, as I could just use a pro-micro microcontroller. The benefit of this is that its easier and cheaper to order the pro-micro than to have an integrated chip, as well as the fact that its easier to repair and replace if either part fails fails.
Research
After this I started thinking about what sort of design I'd like for my keyboard, I had already decided that I want it to be ortholinear, however the exact layout I wasnt sure of yet. I started by considering the keyboards I already had at hand, mainly my SP50, my Gherkin, and my 60%. I figured I liked the SP50 but that building a split keyboard would be not not more expensive but harder to design for a first keyboard. For the Gherkin and 60 I really like their smaller size, but I did not want a staggered layout like the 60, and the gherkin was slightly too small for it to be my daily driver. Additionally, I figured that if I was going to design my own keyboard I'd like it to be kind of novel, even if it's just a bit unusual, so making it totally standard was not an option.