Notes from a Year of Building Keyboards

kevinlynagh.com

51 points·2mol··8 comments

Personally I’d want just to connect two standard keyboards. One for each hand. But then I’d need a keyboard driver that will let the shifting keys on one keyboard affect key actions on the other keyboard. Is it hard to write my own keyboard driver?

Shifting and other modifiers will work ok for USB HID keyboards. Layers, however, won't, so that's why you typically need to connect both halves of a split keyboard.

Also, having two "half-keyboards" takes up less space than using two full ones.

Re: the driver, it's not terribly hard to get the basics working (debouncing, matrix scanning, etc), but you'd probably be better off using QMK, since it's well tested and has pretty much every feature you might need, and then some.

Thank you. I didn’t know about QMK. Interesting.

But actually it was the OS kernel keyboard driver I meant.

You don't need to write one if you use USB HID

Ah, I get it, thanks.

Linux and (I think) Windows support this for Shift and Ctrl. Linux did not support it for Alt, last time I tried.

Now I want one of these Corian keyboards!

I still have some Corian pieces in the basement. Planned to use it for an iris keyboard case. Don't have the right now to get it into shape. Should maybe finally try to get it done. White Corian looks and feels very good. You can get scrap parts cheap on ebay.

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