Well, let me start with the bad news. The finished keyboard is not an ergodox infinity. There have been many delays on producint the ergodox infinity. The PCB’s were bad and they needed to be re-worked. Then when the got the 2000 PCBs back, the cases they had no longer fit them, so they needed to get new cases. Which they were quoted 20 days on, a few days ago.

So that brings us to yesterday when a co-worker of mine asked, “So what ever happened to that keyboard you were going to make.” I of course explained the situation with the ergodox infinity and how sad it was to have to wait so long. And then I got home and started thinking. Did I actually have all of the parts I needed? I had reached a point (as of around march) which I thought I couldn’t go any further with my current board. I needed to start over and do it right. So I toiled around starting to start over, but never quite got it to work. Combined the prospect of taking apart the functional half I wasn’t ready to tackle that.

Fortuneatly it didn’t come to that. Last night I sat down and realized I had enough parts to completly re-make the broken half. Since I thought there might be a problem with the good half, I hadn’t really done that before, but I thought, Hey, worst case I order a couple more parts and re-do that half too. As fortunes would have it, I just had so throughly screwed up the broken half that there was no way I would have gotten it to work. And after replacing the whole thing, it worked nearly flawlessly. (The exceptions being a couple of switches on the old working half that were poorly soldered.)

So! On to the next Phase. I did work on the ergodox all day at work today. It has made for some serious issues while typing here at home on my standard staggered keyboard. Oh well, I adapt back to it pretty quickly so I guess it could be much worse. It definitely is taking some time to get used to. I think it’ll be worth it though.

The next steps in no particular order: Make a new case that has a wrist rest and also holds it at an angle. Figure out my ideal key configuration. Order a second set of keycaps and laser etch legends on them (after deciding on what configuration to use for keys).

So, the new case. I like how pretty the bottom of my case is now, but it has a few issues. Mainly, lack of wrist rests. My wrists are pretty tired today. I think it has to do with a lack of wrist rests. The keyboard I’m using now (The Microsoft Scupt) has pretty decent sized wrist rests and not having them was hard to deal with. (On top of learning how to type again.) Actually, looking back on my third post on keyboards I noticed this gem:

I didn’t realize how relient I am on the wrist rest on my sculpt, but I thought about it the other day and I think I’ll be pretty miserable without one.

Turns out past me was right.

I’ve got a configuration right now that I don’t hate, but I don’t love it either. I think I’ll probably swap it up a bit more before I do anything too drastic. I’m considering a configuration with no punctiuation, except on a function toggle. Probably weird, but maybe worth a try.

The second set of key caps is mostly because I ordred this set for the Ergodox infinity which allegedly supports backlit keys. So I kind of want some that A) match the modifier key set I have now, and B) because I want to take my current set off and put it on another keyboard.

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