Building An Ergonomic Keyboard

Despite the passing of several decades since that scene in Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home in which Mr. Scott remarks A keyboard! How quaint!, here on earth, they remain a central plank of our user interface experience. A plank is an appropriate metaphor, for the traditional keyboard with its layout derived from typewriters and intended to minimize type bar collisions has remained the same flat and un-ergonomic device for well over a century. If like [Tom Arrell] you suffer from repetitive strain injury to your hands and wrists from using a keyboard then a more ergonomic alternative is a must. His solution was to build his own keyboard in two halves.

Hundreds of dollars you say? I have one of those that I used in my job for about a year, at the end of the year I put it back in its box. I wonder if ebay would be interested. I use more ergonomic keyboards like ergodoxen these days.

Go get a Kinesis Advantage. I used my first one for nearly 15 years and never regretted the $300. Bought a second one only because a burglar damaged my first. -ergo.com/keyboards/advantage2-keyboard/ #notashill #satisfiedcustomer

Making something can bring so much more joy than just buying something. If you have any interest in building your own, the Reddit community linked above is a great place to start to get ideas, help, and all of the tips and tricks you want.if(typeof ez_ad_units != 'undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[250,250],'allthingsergo_com-banner-1','ezslot_4',105,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-allthingsergo_com-banner-1-0');

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The Atreus is a small mechanical keyboard that is based around the shape of the human hand. It combines the comfort of a split ergonomic keyboard with the crisp key action of mechanical switches, all while fitting into a tiny profile.

My use case was also quite travel-oriented. I wanted a small keyboard that would enable me to work with it also on the road. There are many other small-ish DIY keyboard designs like Planck and Gherkin available, but Atreus had the advantage of better ergonomics. I really liked the design of the Ergodox keyboard, and Atreus essentially is that made mobile:

Building around the natural posture, the keyboard and mouse should be positioned in a way that keeps your elbows to your sides, and your arms at or below a 90-degree angle. This way, the muscle load is reduced and you're not straining.

Height. Position your keyboard 1 to 2 inches above your thighs. For most people, that probably means employing a pull-out keyboard tray. Alternatively, you can lower your desk, but the keyboard tray is a preferred method. Here's why.

Tilt. The keyboard should ideally be positioned with a negative tilt -- down and away from you, so that your arms and hand follow the downward slope of your thighs. That being said, never use the kickstands provided underneath most keyboards.

First, consider purchasing a keyboard without a number pad, as the number pad puts the letter keys -- your primary input tools -- off-center. As for keeping the mouse and keyboard level, you might want to raise your keyboard with some DIYing, or get a flatter mouse.

Distance. If your screen is too far away, you'll start doing something ergonomics experts like to call "turtling," or craning your neck. Place the monitor too far away, and you'll find yourself extending to reach it.

To guide this article, we turned to Alan Hedge, a professor at Cornell University who has been teaching, researching, and consulting on ergonomics for over 30 years. This site, one of the first ergonomics sites on the Internet, offers a wealth of information on ergonomics.

The GergoPlex is just one of the options out there for keyboard jockeys who want something different, something customizable and, frankly, something more raw than anything you're likely to find inside your average computer hardware outlet -- never mind an Apple Store. It served as my introduction into the fascinating world of DIY ergonomic mechanical keyboards, a wormhole I'm about to open up for you.

To begin with, it's important to understand what a mechanical keyboard is. For a long time, all keyboards were mechanical, and there's a good chance you've typed on one at some point in your life. If you've ever pressed a traditional key offering a nice, progressive throw and maybe even a bit of a click, you've probably experienced a mechanical 'board. Each key on a mechanical keyboard is a discrete, electrical switch. The internals vary, but pressing of a key physically compresses a spring and completes an electrical circuit, which the controller sends along as a keypress.

The other, increasingly common option are membrane-based keyboards, which use springy contact patches called pressure pads. Push down on a pad and you complete the circuit. My first experience on one was learning BASIC on the Atari 400, which featured a spill-proof, membrane that is perhaps the worst keyboard of all time. Since then, membrane-based keyboards have gotten much better, offering physical keys and improved feel combined with greater durability and lower cost. However, for traditionalists, mechanical boards will always be king.

Since individual keys are just electrical switches, it's relatively simple to create a fully custom keyboard. Know a thing or two about printed circuit board design? Whip up something that accepts standard switches, upload your design to a PCB house and you could be soldering together your next board inside of a week. Add a 3D printer to the mix to create a custom housing and you have yourself the beginnings of a beautiful, nerdy hobby.

Bernhardt is a Saskatchewan-based fan of custom PCBs and stenography, passions that have berthed a suite of custom PCBs swathed in catchy silkscreens. Her company, G Heavy Industries, offers a suite of keyboards of various shapes and sizes, ranging from the 10-key Ginny to the nearly full-sized BuzzSaw which, in living up to its name, can be broken into pieces as your typing skills improve.

A custom keyboard is nothing without some sort of embedded processor to pass along those keypresses to your device, and while you could go so far as to write a bespoke firmware or perhaps something that runs on top of Arduino, the Quantum Mechanical Keyboard community already has you covered.

QMK is an open-source framework that greatly simplifies the task of coding up a custom keyboard. With QMK, you need only worry about the details of what you want each key, or combination of keys, to do. QMK handles the ugly details of passing that instruction along down the USB cable.

So, what's it like to actually build and use one of these keyboards? As I mentioned above, my soldering skills are hardly legendary, so I started off with a partially assembled GergoPlex. Bernhardt had kindly added the trickier surface-mount components, leaving me with a bag full of switches and keys to solder myself. Which I did, successfully. For someone who enjoys building kits and figuring out how stuff works, it was legitimately fun.

I wish I could say the same about learning to type on the thing. GergoPlex has just 36 keys split across a pair of small PCBs. That may seem generous considering there are only 26 letters in the traditional English alphabet, but look at all the other keys on a typical keyboard and you can see the challenge.

The idea is that, with so few keys, your wrists and hands never need to move. You're never reaching across to a numberpad, never straining to hit backspace or tab and forcing your hands to leave their home position. All the keys are literally right underneath your fingers and so the ergonomic compromise of using a keyboard is minimized.

Factor in all the special keys that you'll need to access, not to mention things like scroll lock, and it all begins to get complicated. Before disconnecting my old, traditional keyboard, I ran an online typing test and scored 137 words-per-minute. I plugged in the new GergoPlex and tried the same test. My score? Nine wpm. Yes, nine.

As someone who spends all day tethered to a keyboard, whether writing or emailing or communicating in Slack, I cannot tell you how painful it was to be that slow. I made it an hour on my first day before switching back to my old keyboard, twice as long on the second, then started forcing myself to spend at least 4 hours a day figuring out my new keyboard.

I spent hours fiddling with parameters in the QMK code, modifying timing figures in 10 millisecond increments to try to fix the issue. It's a tedious process, requiring a full recompilation and firmware flash of the keyboard with every change. After many iterations I decided to make the obvious choice: switch to something with a few more keys.

I honestly don't know if I'll ever get back up over 130 wpm on the Gergo, nor can I say how long it'll be before I can stop consulting a printed keyboard mapping to remember how to type a tilde. But as I get older and the threat of arthritis and other repetitive stress-related injury grows stronger, the appeal of something perfectly ergonomically suited to my hands gets stronger, too.

Ultimately, though, the world of the ErgoMech keyboard is as much about crafting. It's the art of creating an input device that is perfectly suited to you, both functionally and aesthetically, and in that regard I feel like I'm just getting started.

As the market leader in computer ergonomics, Kinesis has been designing and building premium-grade ergonomic keyboards for more than 25 years. The new Advantage2 features our patented Contoured keyboard design and low-force mechanical key switches to address the major risk factors associated with keyboarding for maximum comfort. With the all-new SmartSetTM Programming Engine, Advantage2 features powerful programming tools designed to let you customize the keyboard to boost your productivity. 2b1af7f3a8

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