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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

Inspiring!

I currently own a number of ergonomic keyboards. Kinesis Freestyle 2 at office, Microsoft Sculpt Ergo at home and I've discovered my ideal keyboard would be a mix of the two.

Would love any ideas on how a custom keyboard could reasonably (time wise) be designed to combine the best aspects of both keyboards:

- separated halves of the Freestyle2,

- wireless bluetooth for both halves instead of the wire the Freestyle2 requires,

- curve like the Microsoft Sculpt Ergo keyboard.

- Ok with either full keys or scissor keys.

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Separated halves is the easiest of your requirements. That is a pretty well solved problem in the keyboard community (see ergodox, etc.).

Having the halves communicate wirelessly is a bigger challenge, but still potentially solvable. The easiest solution would be to have each half register as a separate board. Then because it is wireless you have the issues of batteries and charging and stuff.

The curve might also be tough, especially when combined with the wireless part. The easiest solution would be to have a plate cut, heat it up to soften it slightly and then bend it into the curve that you want. There would probably be a lot of trial and error involved in that though, and it may be faster (though a lot more expensive) to design the final 3D version of it in a cad program and have it milled as one big block.

Standard cherry-style keys will be much easier to source than scissor keys.

This geekhack thread might give you some ideas: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=70221.0

Awesome, thanks!

Some inspiration:

- As a prototype... I'm wondering if the MS Ergo Sculpt keyboard could be cut in half and rewired.

- Maybe two keyboards with two sets of wireless dongles could communicate via the same 2.4 ghz wireless dongle from "their half".

- Maybe even 1 battery each.

That's a great link, thanks I'll see what might be possible.

The wireless requirement will probably be the most annoying, as you'll have to deal with batteries, charging, figuring out how to get the two halves to communicate with each other and/or register as separate devices, etc. But it's certainly possible.

Believe it or not, there are folks out there creating their own curved keyboards. See the following for an example.

https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard

True.. Maybe I can just buy two keyboards and cut them in half, one speaking with it's own USB dongle as a prototype..

That's a great link, checking it out now, thanks for sharing.

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