Peter Lyons

Squeezebox Keyboard v2209

October 13, 2022

I have completed a new revision of the Squeezebox Keyboard - v2209.

Side view of Squeezebox v2209
Top view

Some quick project history checkpoints

Driving Factors beyond previous version

The previous build, v2112, has been my daily driver since February 2022. The build is holding up fine mechanically. It feels very comfortable and my typing speed and accuracy are in the general vicinity of my personal record on any keyboard ever. It's not very consistent, but I can regularly hit 85 WPM with good accuracy on a 1-minute monkeytype test including uppercase and punctuation.

Below I'll outline the various goals I had for the v2209 revision.

Full set of 3D printed parts prior to assembly

No inner reach column for index fingers

I'm noticing that reaching inward for the index inner neighbor column I tend to move the whole hand a bit not just the finger and it throws my home position off. So I wanted to try a layout without any sideways reaching and giving more work to index and middle fingers and continuing to reduce work on the pinky. Thus I wanted to build a 1x4 keywell with chopped choc switches to try to get 4 switches crammed into a radius that can still easily be reached without moving the hand forward. I call this "stay in your lane" layout.

No pinky top column

I noticed a similar issue when I had to reach for the top switch on my pinky column, so I wanted to reduce the pinky to just the "home corner" 2 switches.I felt OK leaving 3 switches for the ring finger and by coincidence that just happens to be 13 switches per hand so 26 for all the fingers which is the length of the English alphabet and I dig that.

Chopped Choc for very tight spacing

Now that I had experience successfully slicing about 1/3 of the material off of a Kailh Choc switch (the bits dealing with LEDs), I wanted to incorporate that into the main keywell so I could fit 4 keys under a finger and have them be easy to reach.

Chopping a choc mini with a rotary tool
Chopped choc showing the cut
Mounted in a 1x4 keywell

(Dearest Internet Commenters: Safety Goggles were worn during the operation of this power tool. Chill.)

Chopping a Choc Mini keyboard switch

Choc Minis for shorter actuation travel

I still am searching for the shortest available actuation travel. The discord community is pretty convinced that actual laptop switches are very difficult to solder into DIY projects, which is a bummer. So the only switch I have identified which I can actually buy with less travel than the current Kailh Choc v2 is the Kailh Choc Mini PG1232. This switch has just a tiny bit less actuation travel, so I bought a bunch of linear blacks.

Strain Relief for the Wiring

I added some simple bolted strain relief bars to the keywells. These actually work great despite being dead simple. Pulling on the wires won't break the solder joints. Really pleased with these.

Strain relief bar on the wiring
Wires running through strain relief and heatshrink tubing terminating in a DuPont jumper connector

New Tenting Mount

Using v2112, I got tired of the camera z-stands wanting to slide around on the desk, so I built a wooden stand for them. I carried this idea forward but I wanted to 3D print more of it and just have a single flat board be the bulky wood part. So I designed some 80° tenting mounts and assembly such that they can screw onto the stand and the Squeezebox bottom case can bolt onto them with 1/4-20 bolts. I also printed some bolt hex handles so the bolts can be tightened by hand without a wrench.

Bottom box with mounting bolts and magnets
Mounted onto the stand

Printed Circuit Board

To help reduce the handwiring spaghetti situation, I wanted to try to make an actual circuit board. If the main switch matrix circuitry could go there, and the diodes could live there instead of by the switches on the keywells, that would tidy things up a lot. I would just need a max of 5 wires coming out of each keywell and going only to the PCB. In v2112 the keywells have to daisy chain to their neighbors so there's a cable for incoming and another one for outgoing which is a fiddly mess.

I didn't know anything about PCB design or KiCAD. As I sat down to learn and started discussing my plans on the Absolem Club discord, Petr Viktorin (encukou on github) saw that a small form factor PCB could be useful for many keyboard builds that were too heavily 3D to put the switches directly onto the PCB, and created an absolutely brilliant and compact PCB design he calls the matrixbar. Aside: it was originally called the squeezebar which I preferred for obvious reasons.

With just a few exchanges on discord, we found a layout that would fit comfortably in the Squeezebox case and account for clearances we need for the adjustment bolts, cables connecting to the PCB, etc. Petr was also able to make it such that each keywell could connect to single row of pin headers meaning the cables would be so tidy and a standard DuPont jumper wire housing would easily fit through the slot to get to the interior of the case.

4 keywells plus the thumb cluster mounted to the slot box with cables routed to inside the case

This was such an exciting and fun development! It saved me months of learning and skill building. And from there I got another unexpected and very pleasant gift from other enthusiasts on the Internet...

PCB Fabrication with PCBWay

PCBWay reached out to me to offer to fabricate a PCB for the squeezebox at no cost. So I took the files that Petr created and uploaded them to PCBWay's online shopping tool. In a few minutes, I had submitted an order for 10 PCBs (enough for 5 split keyboards). Ten days later, the PCBs had been fabricated and shipped across the world to me. It was so exciting to have something with an air of legitimacy giving the project a lot of polish instead of just an embarrassing pile of wires.

Thanks PCBWay and Petr Viktorin! The boards look great, fit in the case perfectly, and work great.

Custom MatrixBar PCB with pin headers, diodes, and MCU sockets

New Case Approach

The PCB enabled me to put all the electronics into the top case, which I call the "slot box" part. That now nests into the bottom case and some magnets snap it into position. The nice thing about this is all the electronics are housed in that single unit and I can remove it from the stand to adjust either the ergonomic fit or the wiring and it's a unit without any wires that need to be disconnected.

The main driver for this was v2112 had a box w/ lid design where the lid bolts to the box with 4 m3 bolts. This is somewhat tedious to remove all the bolts to make an adjustment, so I wanted something easier. The new design is way easier: I can just grab it and remove it without undoing any fasteners, but it is noticeably jankier where the bolts were rock solid. I'm not convinced this is an improvement overall and probably need another iteration to find something that really delivers here.

Case halves show open

What about keymaps? (engram)

So I'm down to 26 total keys on the fingers and the fingers don't all have the same number of keys, so sticking with dvorak doesn't really apply. In fact, most of the existing layouts can't really be morphed to apply to this hardware. So I went shopping for keymaps briefly. I did not do a huge research effort, so there could be a lot more to explore here, but quickly skimming through some discord conversations and online summaries of keymap evolution, I discovered a fairly new layout called engram which appealed to me for 2 main reasons:

After some discussion in discord, I was encouraged to swap q and z out to combos to make space to fit period and comma on the base layout, so my layout is now basically take engram, swap a few silly letters around to account for my hardware weirdness, and add period and commma.

Engram layout for Squeezebox v2209

Quick Video

Hackaday Project Log

As I did this build, I posted smaller build logs for almost each session over on Hackaday. Feel free to read through those for more blow-by-blow commentary and thoughts.

STL Files to 3D Print This

Squeezebox v2209 on printables.com

Reddit Discussion

Discussed on /r/ergomechkeyboards here.

Thoughts and Learnings at the Moment

I still can't type on v2209 and am slowly learing one key at a time on keybr.com. I think I'll need to practice a lot and get fluent and then maybe in a few months I'll try to use v2209 as my daily driver. We'll see. Here's some thoughts on the overall project.

Crimping DuPont Jumper Connectors Sucks

I bought a crimper so I could make DuPont jumper connectors the exact right length with the exact right number of wires and consistent wire colors. But sheesh, this is terrible business. Crimping them is extremely fiddly and frustrating. The crimping goes wrong easily. The metal connector doesn't reliably snap into the locked position in the plastic housing. I think the actual connector form factor is more or less OK-ish, and being slim enough to fit through the slot box slots is great, but I need to do it with factory cables somehow. Ultimately these connectors are going to be one of the least reliable aspects of this build. I may need to glue the wires into the housings to keep them from degrading and I actually thought about cutting the connectors off entirely and soldering the wires to the header pins. It would be a lot less plug-n-play but at least they switches would always type.

I'm still searching for other small but robust connectors. Folks have linked me to various shape JST connectors, but they don't fit through the slots, so I'd need to design holes specifically for them to get down into the slot box. That's fine and there's enough space available to do it. It's just nice that DuPonts are so slim they can fit through the m3 slots.

Nested Boxes for the Case Is Kinda Bad

The nested boxes with magnets for the case is workable but mostly bad. There's some slop due to print warping that I have to address with a rubber band or the case won't be stable when closed. Something based around a smaller number of bolts is probably better.

PLA is Tough for Adhesives

The DAP RapidFuse adhesive I use tends to leech into the PLA and dries visibly white which is a bummer. Anything I can do to reduce this or avoid adhesives altogether I'll try.

My initial design for mounting the PCB to the case was some smallish PLA standoffs glued to the inside of the slot box. At one point I knocked one half of the keyboard off my workbench onto the floor and that failed in 2 ways. One standoff popped the glue, and the other one sheared the standoff itself. So I had to seek advise and designed a 1-piece rectangular mount which uses bolts to attach to both the PCB and the slot box. That is much sturdier.

Keywells Overall Feel Good

The keywell layout feels good. I think I may ultimately like typing on this best so far but need a lot of practice.

Choc Minis?

The Choc minis are slightly better than choc v2s do to actuation travel but it's by such a small amount that it's probably negligible.

PCB Learnings

I ruined at least 3 PCBs in not really knowing what I was doing. The first one I didn't understand how pin headers should be mounted and I soldered the wrong side. Somewhere in the socketing of the MCU created a short on 2 other PCBs and I thought for like a week that I had fried 2 Elite-C MCUs. Only when I pried them out of the sockets so they were disconnected from the PCB was I then able to flash them and they were fine. So I think 2 of the PCBs had a solder short somewhere (probably the reset button through holes) and I had to just grab spares and move on to avoid spending too much time debugging.

Case Hole Layout Is Tricky

I tried to do CAD for the holes in the case for the USB cable, RJ9 connector, and reset button. But it turns out predicting the wiring constraints is hard. My USB hole ended up not accounting for the extra height socketing the MCU adds so it didn't initially line up and I had to print more slot boxes to correct it. I also realized the reset button could go on the outer face which worked out fine in terms of easy to reach, hard to reach by accident though, and easy to route the wires to the PCB pin headers from the button.

Other Misc Mistakes