I’ve not been blogging much here, but thats going to change. Fresh lick of theme, and… we’re off.
First up, this Ortho-linear keyboard from OLKB. I have a distinct keyboard fetish and I don’t think it’ll be every satisfied. Always looking for something different and this OLKB Plank kit seems to have tickled every spot. The Ortho-linear layout puts everything on a grid, and has no proven benefits but it does feel nice to type on in terms of finger positioning.
The 40% layout is compact (numbers are orange raise and QWERTYUIOP, shifted number symbols are blue lower and the same). I spend more time mapping the 40% compression more than worrying about the ortho-linear layout.
Building was simple and fun. The PCB was lovely to solder with and the biggest trudge was making sure all the keys were well positioned while mounting the aluminium plate. The AVR controller on the board makes it more chatty than many keyboards with a small piezo buzzer playing a wake up tune and lots of customisation options hidden away. If you are curious, it’s the QMK Firmware running on the AVR chip.
And like a gateway keyboard, I’ve already got an order in for the Preonic variant which goes 60%, and an extra row. And the Planck, it’s going onto my four-system HDMI KVM to get some working time in.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog