Tracking my adventures in split-keyboard land with the Sofle V2 with design choices heavily influenced by tomsaleeba/ergoslab as well as the original josefadamicik/SofleKeyboard projects, as well as other layouts I find as I look around.
Until this project, I had never worked on a real soldering project, so there were a lot of, shall we say, learning opportunities. Like, a whole bunch of learning opportunities.
Additionally, I've only ever had one mechanical keyboard, never a split keyboard... or layers, or ortholinear, or QMK, or really even C++.
In the end, though, I'm VERY pleased with how things turned out!
- Key Layout via Keyboard Layout Editor
- Key Caps available via from kbdfans
A note on the caps: they don't have a homing mark on
FandJ, but after using them for a while I've found homing marks unnecessary due to the SA profile, knobs, and layout.If you want to add homing indicators, I found two options:
- Ball Bearing Mods (which seem like an awesome-but-more-destructive-than-I-want for these caps)
- Just use a piece of tape (which slid off after a day or two for me)
Before we really dive into my build and I bore you to death with "mah layouts, let me show you themz", here are some things I learned that might actually help you:
- International orders take a long time. My order took about a month from Vietnam.
- The official Build Guide is great
- Soldering
- SOCKET YOUR MCUs, but double-check your pin types:
- All of the low-profile pins I found were round; you will need both male and female round pins.
- Round pins and Square pins are not compatible
- "Pitch" Refers to the distance between pins; you NEED 2.54mm. Do not buy 2.00mm.
- Solder matters. Junk solder will leave your welds sharp, making it hard to clean flux residue
- Avoid melting your board by staying around 600°F
- The yellowish junk on your board is flux residue, and you can clean it with rubbing alcohol; you probably didn't melt your board
- Don't be afraid to hold the iron to the PCB solder points for a bit; once they get hot enough the solder will literally flow from your iron into the joint
- If the solder flows, but still makes a ball, you need more flux. I started with Pen flux, but save yourself time and order some Paste Flux, the pen is for when you know what you're doing
- You'll make crappy welds when you start, and quickly get better and be tempted to go back and "fix" them. Don't. Finish all the way through, then go back and check - When you think you've got enough practice, do 50% more practice.
- SOCKET YOUR MCUs, but double-check your pin types:
- Desoldering
- Don't mess up, desoldering sucks
- If you can afford it, get a Desoldering Iron
- If you can't afford it... Find a way to. These next steps suck worse than eating ramen for a few
weeks:
- Set your iron to ~700°F to start (if you can adjust the temp)
- Use desoldering wick
- Always use the tip of the wick to start; if a lot is coming off the joint, try to move up the wick
- Dip the tip of the wick into your flux paste. It'll make a mess on the board, but it will help attract the solder
- Trim it between uses
- Remove as much solder as you can. Ideally, the pins/parts just fall off
- If all else fails, try to clip the pins to isolate them.
- NEVER FORCE A PIN THROUGH: If it doesn't slip through easily, trim the wick and try again. Forcing a pin can rip out the contacts from the board - iz bad
- Firmware
-/_ triggering \/| too frequently. It's
been working out well so far!
Via (Keyboard Layout Manager)
Top-left has one Tap/Hold key for Tab/Alt (I've had my CapsLock bound to Alt for a while).
Bottom right has a =/Shift Tap/Hold.
Both Esc and Enter act as layer shifts, and there's a Alt+Shift key, which is my "Meta" key
for tmux/Firefox
This has ended up being my most useful layer. The Green keys are a fantastic stand-in for when I just need a quick thing done with the mouse (webpage that doesn't support Vimium, for example), the blue keys are VIM keys for things that need arrows.
VIM uses CTRL+W as a prefix for a lot of graphical operations, and tmux ALT+A, so throwing these
in to see how I like them on row 1.
Lastly, my KVM switch is triggered by Ctrl+Ctrl+[1/2], so the two macro keys on the right take
care of that.
The original idea for this layer was inspired by tomsaleeba/ergoslab's bracket layer, but my brain just couldn't get it to stick...
Until I added the bottom layer on the left. Now making Markdown links is:
ESC+k
Name of link
ESC+ l i v o
l puts in the ], i does (, v pastes the URL, then o closes the ). Magic.
The FN keys are because they didn't have anywhere else to live after the most recent redesign.
Basically disables some of the keys that are bad for gaming (Tab/Alt Tap, Esc/Sym) and adds printsc.
I could probably simplify this to a flag eventually...
Ortholinear WASD is even weirder than normal, so shifting the keys to the right was a necessity.
After playing for a while, I realized shifting the top and bottom rows were unnecessary and confusing. Additionally, the right-side is sorta a passive hotkey system; by default games don't acknowledge the CTRL key is pressed, so the key just registers as the alpha, but if you're setting a custom mapping, it'll see it and you'll have a new hotkey.
I learned to type wrong, I think. I frequently used my right index finger to press b, but with the
sofle that'd be quite a reach :)
That's a pretty small issue, though, when compared to the fact that I've ALWAYS used my left pointer
finger to push c. This dramatically throws off c, v, and b in an Ortho layout. That'll be
the largest learning curve in this process.
Other complications are remembering that my right thumb can't hit space (resulting in a lot of
prematurely sent messages), and attempting to hit the old locations for ESC and BACKSPACE.
The biggest wins so far are mostly on the MOUSE layer, which is a bit surprising considering how
busy that layer ended up being. Controlling the mouse with WASD-type controls (ESDF,
technically) is incredibly useful, and having HJKL as arrow keys is everything I'd hoped it would
be.
Also, flashing the firmware quickly means that I don't ingrain any bad habits by using the wrong keys for too long. I do wish I could flash both keyboards without having to play musical chairs with cords, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
And good goat do my back and neck feel better already. Like, WAY better.
// Dev note: regex for firmware->configurator:'<,'>s%\v([^, ]+)%"\1"%g