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veikman / dactyl-keyboard

Programmatic keyboard CAD
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DMOTE vs Dactyl Manuform? Thumbcluster adjustments? Back wall removal? #25

Closed smallstepman closed 4 years ago

smallstepman commented 4 years ago

Hi Viktor, thank you for your amazing work! This is not an issue. I'm a happy owner of DMOTE, but I can no longer stand the wires and thanks to recent advancements in NRF+ProMicro community-designed circuits (https://github.com/joric/nrfmicro/releases/tag/1.3), I decided it would be shame to not use this as an opportunity to build myself another keyboard, but I can't decide which one to build.

My questions:

  1. have you ever printed dactyl manuform? if yes what's your opinion on it when compared with your work? I'm mainly interested in differences in how thumb keys are laid out. In DMOTE 3/7 keys seem to be hard to reach for me (mainly the middle one, the one behind it (looking from hand's perspective) and the one below them). On the other side, I feel like my thumb will be doing this on DManuform. Sorry for asking this non technical question - unfortunately, I didn't find any answers to that question online.

  2. can you maybe point me a direction where in your config I could try to

    • adjust the angles of thumb cluster and it's placement relative to the rest of the case? I'd like to try:

    • rotate it towards ground, and in opposite direction

    • move it closer/away from the hand (west/east axis)

    • rotate it towards/outwards to the hand

    • minimize the case:

    • remove back wall (EDIT: cut down/slim down; just realized removal would suggest a hole in the case...)

    • reduce/slim down amount of material connecting the case and cluster from the 'inside of the hand' (nearby south middle) - I'm ok with how challenging it will be to solder it

To some extent I got familiar with your config, I almost removed the back wall, but I always ended up with some artifacts like holes in case of hanging material. Are these modifications possible to do from config, or do I have to dive into the code? (which is something I want to avoid since I'm not familiar with closure and it's ecosystem)

veikman commented 4 years ago

Hi, and thanks.

No, I haven’t printed a Dactyl-ManuForm. I don’t have trouble reaching the thumb keys on a DMOTE, perhaps because my hands are on the large side.

For the position of the thumb cluster relative to its anchor, in the current draft towards version 0.6.0, you want to look at anchoring → extrinsic-offset for the thumb0 cluster. For angles, the first place to look is by-key → clusters → thumb0 → parameters → layout, where you will find base roll (x axis), pitch (y) and yaw (z). Because these three parameters are applied in sequence, they may behave counter to intuition, like a set of gimbals. Also note that the thumb cluster is actually composed of two clusters in the configuration; thumb1 comprises the lowest two keys and may itself need rotation (or removal) for your design.

To get rid of the blocky far end of the case and replace it with a smaller wall, start by disabling rear-housing and the tweaks that target it, then enable to-ground for the north wall of the main cluster. A comparison with the Dactyl-ManuForm configuration file should be useful here, as it has no rear housing.

Good luck with the wireless build!

veikman commented 4 years ago

To make key-cluster rotation easier, I’ve shifted from doing it in by-key to doing it with standard anchoring (using key-clusters), in fa17f33acbdfceb9237f36cc974da9f01a9c9c83. Please let me know if you have further questions.