Man, I love my keyboard !

Quick disclaimer, this is my first blog post ever, please be kind to me. But don't hesitate to give me constructive criticism!

From a Gaming Keyboard to a 42-Keys Split, Columnar, Staggered, Ergonomic Keyboard: My Journey

Yes, I know... there's a lot of fancy terms, let me explain you them and the beginning of my ergonomic/keyboard journey !

Glossary

• What are those words anyway ?!


• Why did I switch ?


• Build from scratch


• Wrist rest Deltahub Carpio 2.0


• Final thoughts

First of all, what ?

The first time I've heard about ergonomic keyboards was on and when I first saw him using it, I was like "damn this is so cool!" so I went and learned about ergo keyboards and the deep niche that is the Custom keyboards community.

As a PC gamer, my keyboard journey started with a classic: the

And even after a bit more than 5 years, I have no issue whatsoever with it.

But now, my current daily is a Corne V3 Cherry ().

.

So, why ?!

As a Software Engineer, I plan to type a lot on a keyboard for most of my life and when you hear about . Why really nice ? Because once I totally screwed my leds soldering (it was so tiny, I kinda gave up at one point to be honest), they sent me a personalized kit with PCBs and pre-soldered leds and I just had to solder the micro-controllers and the OLED screens.

Here is the kit I first had:

on how to solder/built it yourself.

So here are a few pictures of the massacre I did on my first solders. 😭

My apologies to the soldering community...



And frankly, I'm too ashamed to show you my first full PCB with per key LEDs and underglow RGBs.

Anyway, after ordering the PCBs pre-soldered, I de-soldered my micro-controllers and OLED screens to solder them back on those new PCBs. And everything worked out perfectly fine !

It is now time to configure those micro-controllers.

QMK, The firmware

If you don't know anything about custom keyboards, let me introduce you to to configure your keyboard's keymap and its layers visually to use the JSON output and flash it to your keyboard

Their documentation is clear and detailed but if you don't get something, they are active on their Discord to help you.

So after a lot of thinking and work, .

The plan is to swap them with rp2020 micro-controllers later for further capabilities allowing me to add a lot of features to the firmware (especially OLED stuff/games or RGB animations since they are both heavy).

I'm not gonna be specific about my keymap because it's personal, boring and detailed especially because I'm french and I had to make a default QWERTY layer for easy access on characters used in programming like "|&_-([{`' and a custom trigger for AZERTY to use characters like "éèêàùç€".

Wrist rest

As you may have recognized on the banner picture, I have the for example). If you're also looking to improve your typing comfort and ergonomics, I'd highly recommend exploring the world of custom keyboards. It may just change the way you interact with your computer forever.