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Putting Contourboarding on hold

A project log for Contourboarding

Implanting a custom USB brain and TrackPoint in an old Kinesis Advantage Classic contoured PS/2 keyboard

david-h-bronkeDavid H. Bronke 11/24/2020 at 15:370 Comments

This project has stalled once again, partly because I found a way to do something I've wanted to do, but didn't think was going to be as simple: designing and 3D-printing my own contoured keyboard case.

A while back I came across the Dactyl keyboard, and it looked like it was pretty close to what I wanted - it was basically a somewhat minimized split-hand version of the Kinesis Advantage design I'm such a big fan of. However, I knew I'd want to make modifications, and learning both a new language (Clojure) and a new modeling system (OpenSCAD) in order to make those modifications was a bit daunting at the time.

Recently, though, I took another look at it and realized that Clojure is really just Lisp on the JVM. Once I started digging into the source, things got clearer pretty quickly, and within a few days I had the chassis reworked to the basic design I want. That, coupled with the fact that you can use (a slightly modified version of) QMK to take care of the firmware aspect of these boards, means that this will be a much faster way for me to achieve my goal, and it should end with an end product that is not only much more polished, but also more customized to my personal preferences.

Given that, I've started a new project, which is a fork of Dactyl: the Dactyl Lynx keyboard. I'll keep this project around, since it has a lot of my learnings from when I first started to understand keyboard construction, but I don't think I'll be pursuing this particular idea any further. (i.e., replacing the guts of a Kinesis)

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