So, the other day doing dumpster diving I found an interesting piece of history, here are some crappy shots I took

At first while in the dumpster I thought they switches where some kind of KPT switches I saw once online, to my surprise after desoldering the switches I found out they were actually Tec switches and the only information I could find online was in deskthority.

Here is a show of the bare board without the keycps

and to my delight the keycaps turned out to be double-shot, in very nice shape after a thorough clean-up

The switches are clicky and quite frankly not so good. I have to say while in the board they sounded better, but in the actual project they lost the hollow sound, but still. You can hear here how it sounded.

Anyways I wanted to build something with them, so I set out to build a quick atreus-like keyboard but in split-mode.

In the future I want to tweak the layouts so I wanted to have a simple a nice format for the coordinates of every key and no existing solutions quite fit my needs. I’ve been a fan of asymptote for many years but the language and the libraries haven’t quite convinced me, so I wrote a haskell script to do this using the excellent diagrams library.

The result is in this repository. To do quickly a keyboard without many tools I just bought some thin wood sheets and created the first test for the layout:

In principle the idea is to drill holes where the three switch’s legs are and glue the bottom of the switch to the wood (yes, I know is not the best way to go but well, at least I’m recycling).

Here I am punching holes into the wood to have a guide for the hand drill

and after much work, this is what I got

which in total ends up looking like this

Although we are almost there, it is not over. It is not so nice to leave the sides open to dust and other inconvenients, so I would like to cover them. I bought some 3mm wood sticks to cover the sides by gluing them together and some plexiglass to have the front panel be able to shine light through.

Here you see the raw material and I cut myself a bit cutting this plexiglass, so be careful!

Next time I will document better the process of gluing everything together and so on, but since it was so messy I kind of forget. After sanding the edges it is a fair enough result.

And that’s all, if I find time and people are interested I will at some point write a tutorial of how to write from scratch a quantum mechanical keyboard configuration for a hand-wired split keyboard.

If you have comments you can take a look at this reddit thread.