Just finished my latest homebuilt board. 3-D printed case, masonite plates, box navy switches, Akko SA-L keycaps.
For this one, instead of manually hand wiring the entire matrix, I designed that part in KiCAD and sent it off to JLCPCB (minimum order quantity also means I have four more of them with no particular need). I still manually wired it to the raspberry pi pico though. There’s also a new and really user-friendly tool called “Pog” for the Python based KMK firmware. That was really nice.
Conceptually, I love it, and I'm subbed to !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world but I never learned to touch type properly, so their charms are wasted on me. I even made two handwired ones to try it out (a Planck with an extra column and an ill-considered fixed-wire split that demands either a full 1u pinkie column stagger or none at all), and it turns out I like building more than I like practicing typing. I plug the planck in from time to time when working on something that's normally headless, but I have grown fond of trundling along at 60-70 wpm on these slightly cursed 1800 variations.
Actually making another one wouldn't be all that hard. I did a somewhat low-profile numpad that's basically half of an ortho split anyway.
Fair enough. I sort of idealise simplicity of ortholinear but I've also never considered the fact that there would be an annoying learning curve to it.