Excellent! And just so I don’t send you off on a wild goose chase, “Electron” is not the app’s name, just the platform (a browser wrapper, basically) that VIA uses for its desktop app. It’ll be on VIA’s github page, if not their main page. Glad you got it all squared away though. That’s a truly silly default keymap for what I understand is a super nice keyboard.
Just in case you’re still looking…
HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.
For the Epomaker, not bad at all. You can either futz with your privacy settings to let it work in a Chromium based browser, or simply download the contained VIA app. I dual boot, so I haven’t tried to install or run software from RK or Redragon or any of the other brands still using proprietary software. It might work, but honestly I am just not sure. If you do have to dig up a Windows PC, any changes you make should be stored on the keyboard itself and will be persistent across reboots. On the plus side, it isn’t so much the driver you have to be woriied about. It is just USB HID. The onyl issue is whetyher you’ll be able to remap keys and adjust lighting without resorting to whatever Fn+Key combos Royal Kludge builds in.
As I mentioned, Epomaker are no saints, and stories of their poor customer support are numerous. Buy from a third-party retailer (Amazon works well if you can stomach it) with a generous return policy and assume you’ll need to make a final decision by the time the return window closes. Beyond that, they just commission factories to do a run of a given board and re-badge it. Sometimes no one else does the same board, sometimes several someones do. They’re a glorified White Label, but that has the benefit that sometimes the hardware itself is quite nice.
For the switches, the same basic types still exist as with Cherry, but that market has exploded since their patent ran out. There’s still clicky (self explanatory), linear (smooth action on press), and tactile (a bump of some sort that requires extra pressure to overcome, but not intentionally noisy). There are also still multiple weights. The original Cherrys and clones are still around as a baseline: Red = Light-medium Linear; Brown = light-med Tactile; Blue = medium clicky. Heavier versions of each are Black, Clear, and Green, respectively. If the name of the switch is any more complicated than that (e.g. “Epomaker Wisteria,” or “Holy Panda” or the like), you need to parse the listing to see if it’s the type of switch you’d like. Switches also frequently come lubed from the factory these days, which can be nice for Linears and Tactiles.
I haven’t tried that board, but yeah, your options in that range are limited. I might consider instead the Epomaker Split65. You lose the macro keys but gain a knob and VIA. Neither RK nor Epomaker are particularly good citizens when it comes to respecting the QMK open source license, but the actual usability of the Epomaker on VIA is going to be better, and sometimes they contribute their firmware back. Low-end closed-source Keyboard software is generally quite bad.
Actual typing quality could be a deciding factor. To that end, I’ll happily let others weigh in. Worth noting to make sure you get switches you like, which may mean getting replacements. The RK seems to have “fast linears” (so early actuation point and often a fairly light spring) or Browns (tactile, and generally no better than “okay”), while the Epomaker has somewhat light linears (45g) or very light linears (45g).
It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”
Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.
Yup. I also liked this, but I’m trying hard not to just quote the whole thing back, because it’s all good.
Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own. I can’t think of a better argument for a humanities requirement than a billionaire being asked “how do we know what is real?” and responding with “cryptographic signatures.”
You can extend the matrix across so it becomes one board, but it means custom wiring the connector.
Yeah, physically that will work. I should have mentioned that, as it’s what I did (permanently wired) on my failure of an ergo split to get it split at all with one MCU, but electrically it worked perfectly fine. Proper USB-C/Thunderbolt like the caravan 2 seems like it would be a good solution for a PCB, and I’m curious what issues the mini HDMI produced (crosstalk maybe, or just complaining about sourcing mini to mini cables?). Ethernet or DB9 should do for hand-wired, though obviously bulkier.
I will admit I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of a split keyboard that was viewed as one unit by the host device AND that had more than two parts. I don’t think the usual suspects for firmware will support that, though I could be wrong. That said, if you can live with more cords there’s no particular reason you couldn’t make it a split keyboard and two macro pads, or two split keyboards. To the computer, “keypresses is keypresses” for the most part. In any event, this could work out fine in several different approaches.
I’ll echo @[email protected] and say that I don’t believe there are any commercially available half-height keyboard switches with proper keycaps, though I’m sure there are various pushbutton switches that could give you the basic functionality. Still, I might write that one off for now.
For the layout, your stagger looks modest but fine; that’s very much a personal thing though, and I completely borked it on my first (and only) split board. One other thing I didn’t love about my split was having two vertical tiers of thumb keys. Thumbs are strong but short and move differently. Clearly it can work, but more often you’ll see the arc extended rather than stacking. In any event, I’d recommend at least printing up a full-size copy of the layout and seeing how your fingers will need to move to hit everything you’d like. It’s far short of a full mockup, but it would have a great value-to-effort ratio. :-)
For the numpad, I don’t know your use case but backslashes aren’t commonly used for math (right?) or data entry so I might move the dot/comma separator onto that group of four and park backslash somewhere else. The keymap beyond that should be fully programmable, so maybe just don’t spend big on custom keycaps until you’re sure you’ve settled in on something you like. A lot of people at [email protected] (and elsewhere) will use all blanks or blanks on the mods.
LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.
This may not go how they think it will. As an aside, for the moment at least, this is only for AI used/procured by the federal government.
I have a Ducky One Mini, so a 60%.
Likes: Better build quality than most plastic-case boards. Genuine Cherry switches, while not quite the selling point they used to be, are better than commodity clones. Convenient DIP switches for a few common settings. Everything just generally feels decent and solid.
Dislikes: Not hot-swap, though I think the One 3 might be?. Kinda pricy at MSRP, but if selection is limited then it is what it is. I do thoroughly dislike that for my board the complicated and obtuse on-board remapping/macro functionality is the only way to do it. If either of the ones you’re looking at supports on-PC software, even Windows, do it. This may be less of an issue if this will be your primary board and you won’t have to change things up often.
Along with Filco, they sort of are what they are: high quality but non-hobbyist Taiwan-designed boards with design philosophies that are just now creeping out of the 2010s. That’s not strictly meant to be a criticism. I often use boards that are literally from early 90s, but it does sort of describe a certain set of expectations about materials, performance, programmability, etc.
My N810 was my single favorite piece of industrial design in a mobile device. Not perfect, and use cases moved on (to say nothing of the internals), but it was so unique and thoughtful and intricate without feeling overly fragile.
I preferred Mepis. 😊
Great, but I don’t think that graph is showing any particular spike, just a nice and gentle upward trend in share. The article also overlooks that there is a certain element of Windows and MacOS computers being replaced by tablets and phones, while Linux is already an enthusiast choice on the desktop, meaning it will be insulated somewhat and gain market share through attrition.
On the plus side, Steam and Proton and maturing DEs/distros and enshittification of Windows certainly make Linux a much more viable “normie” option than it’s ever been. We’re a far cry from the CD-ROM of Red Hat that came with my “Intro to Linux” book in 1999 but couldn’t use my Winmodem or printer and really preferred to run XWindows in grayscale.
Late to the game on this one, but Thomas “Chyrosran22” reviewed this board. I watched it a while ago, but IIRC, it boiled down to “pretty mediocre board, but fine, elevated by the keycaps.”
We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.
Hand wiring can be a lot of fun. I have done about a dozen boards, including the “pocket battleship” I use for work everyday. This looks perfect.
Did you go with KMK?
For the very basics of KiCAD, their own intro is helpful. I had to wrap my head around the workflow: first schematic, then PCB.
Once you grasp that, some keyboard specific stuff is described by Joe Scotto in this video. He tends to rush his tutorials though, so best to go through the KiCad page first or revisit the video after.
For resources, I found Ai03’s library of footprints to be perfect, except that his vertical 2U were not oriented how I needed them, which I realized too late, LOL. Then, the kbplacer plugin by adamws was absolutely invaluable and saved me so much time. I used JLCPCB, because even when US-China tariffs were at their worst (and goodness knows they could be again if Trump gets a hangnail or something), JLC was still the cheapest option for me.
If you’ve never done a PCB before, I might humbly suggest keeping to a fixed layout for the first go-round. I did that on my first board and it worked perfectly for what I intended it to be. I got a little ambitious with this one, and ambition+inexperience+impatience led to a flawed project.
This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.