New EMK joins the Family! Meet Kaly the Caliper!

Hi EMK community! I have been lurking the old Reddit and this new instance for quite a while, and after some time with the CSTC40 (plank-like) I decided that I wanted my own ErgoMechKeyboard. However, I had 0 experience in making one and initially planned on a Cantor (affordable, easy to build, already supported).

However, the more I thought of it, the more I disliked some design decisions of the Cantor [still a great board! Just don’t think it would be for me], like I couldn’t find any Ergogen file for it, I strongly was against a thumb cluster where I could only type the two inner thumb keys (the ones you fold your thumb in to type) (a problem with almost all 3x6+3 I have seen, as they are waaay to tucked in for me) and I wanted it to have a small mascot, like the Ferris Sweep had!

From that, I decided that I would build my own, from scratch in Ergogen through to KiCad and learning to solder. It was a wild ride with more than 2 months of work and waiting, but here it is!

The core ideas that I tried to follow when making this keyboard was for it to be affordable, cute and have all of the keys be reachable. It uses a blackpill and choc v1 switches (my one uses 20g chocs), a trrs connector and type c cable to the computer Currently I set my one up with vial and 10 layers and it has worked well so far (started typing on it 2 hours ago or so and got to 80wpm).

And the good news: I will be open-sourcing ALL of it for anyone to build, modify, improve and have fun with it together with a few videos on how I made it (the full process from the keyboard idea to the finished product) and how anyone can get started doing the same! But, these are plans for the future, when I have a bit more time in my hands, so please be patient and it will be here!

And here are a few more pictures for those that read through all of it:

Keyboard Close

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0mR9I

Kaly Close

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0mu8N

Kaly in plants

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0mIFR

Kaly and Caliper

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0m7wX

With cable

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0mYtn

Exposed Switches

https://freeimage.host/i/HL0mTap

dovenyi,

Please ping me if you share the files or more resources.

Dwctor,

Hello! I have just open-sourced the Kaly! You can find it here! I am not sure of where to ping you, so I will do my best to find somewhere that you can see!

choas,
@choas@lemmy.world avatar

@Dwctor you could also add the ‘ergogen’ topic to your project to make it findable via github.com/topics/ergogen

… and maybe @dovenyi pings :shrug:

Dwctor,

I totally forgot to add the topic, thanks for the reminder! It’s there now.

WhatASave,

This looks so nice and the process sounds really cool but why is it in dirt lol

Dwctor,

Sometime ago I saw someone post their keyboard in the midst of plants in the Reddit EMK, I thought it was funny enough to post my own version of it! Sadly, I don’t have the original post on hand… I did make sure not to get it dirty almost at all and to clean it properly afterwards!

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