After seven years of Wordpress, it’s time for a change. Welcome to my new Hugo-based blog. It’s static. It’s cool. I probably will continue to not update it.

I want a better keyboard but my plea to the industry had no effect. Since no one would make one for me I built the keyboard myself. My main goals were:

• Standard split-QWERTY layout mirroring the Microsoft Natural Keyboards
• No number pad
• High quality mechanical switches
• Bluetooth and USB-C connections
• Plug and play (no-solder) microcontroller replacement

Layout

Building a keyboard naturally starts with designing the key layout. I used the wonderful Keyboard Layout Editor to build a tweaked version of the classic Microsoft Natural Keyboard layout.

Our house is old. City records show it was built in 1910, but that’s just the age the city assigned to all the houses older then that. Our neighbors, who have a house that started life as a mirror image of ours, have found old newspapers in their attic from the 1870s making that our best guess for the age.

In some cases having an old house is great: structurally the house is solid. Big chunks of our house were built with old-school dimensional lumber from the era when a 2x4 was actually 2 inches by 4 inches. We have walls with 8x10 angled beams in them. Our basement has 2 foot thick field stone walls. In the 19th century folks built things to last.

Over on Hacker News, there is a discussion about Atwood’s new keyboard. It looks nice, but it’s not my ultimate keyboard. So bored rich people out there, build me a better keyboard.

First, it needs to be ergonomic. Microsoft has pretty much perfected this, so let’s start by copying their natural keyboard design. The basic wave shape and key layout of the current natural keyboards is great, especially since they fixed the layout of the navigation (insert/delete) cluster. We’ll drop the stupid silver buttons across the top: they’re way too far to reach from the home row. We’ll also need to nuke the zoom thing in the center. We’re going to need that space for something else later.

After a long wait, my MakerBot Replicator 2X was finally shipped and came in. I’ve wanted a 3D printer for a long time (going back to the Cupcake days) and only this year was able to convince my wife that we “needed” one.

After much screwing around, I finally got the ST7565 working with the Arduino Due. The wonderful u8glib recently added support for the Due and had preexisting support for the ST7565.

I’ve spent the last several days unsuccessfully trying to get the ST7565 to work with the Arduino Due. I’ve been trying to port ladyada’s ST7565 library to the SAM core without much luck.

Using the ST7565 with Uno and the library works with no issues, as would be expected, so I didn’t fuck up soldering or anything easy to diagnose like that.