The funny thing about keyboard end game is that it usually involves more than one keyboard. Rare is the board that is great for both home and away. Having finished their dactyl build, [RalphCoder13] was looking to build something slimmer and more portable, and the Birdy44 was born.
This hand-wired beauty uses a pair of Waveshare RP2040 Zeros and features a pair of 40mm Cirque track pads that were salvaged from a Steam controller.
As you may have guessed, there are 44 Kailh Chocs that sit underneath a combination of MBK and 3D-printed keycaps. Our favorite part might be the tenting legs, which are optional and connect magnetically.
Part of portability is how you decide to carry the thing. You probably don’t want it naked and loose in your backpack if you can avoid it, right? To that end, he designed a nice little case for the halves. The original plan was to use magnets to hold them in place inside the topless case, but that didn’t work out so well, so he added wide elastic bands to stretch around the case.
Is this still not portable enough for you? Check out this folding split keyboard.
Via KBD
How people have this strength to build hand-wired keyboards? I have build Lily58 instead of Dactyl because wires are the worst thing in my projects – very time-consuming to do it nicely like on those Birdy44. Now I want to build trackball just to try the thing (have no experience with trackballs at all and want to try on cheap) and don’t want to fabricate one PCB – now I can’s sleep well when parts are on printer and sensor on the way from ali because of wires – even when I know it’s less then one half of split keyboard xD
Wiring can be tedious indeed, but this one doesn’t seem the worst though, there are many projects that are much much worse.
Can you imagine all the people who do it as a job though, all day long soldering wires, geez.
And in the old days it was even worse, everything was wires.
And it’ll be a long time before we have robots that can do it for us, it’s a bit too complex.
oooh cool. Great integrated touchpad
Interesting, I just did a search on ali and they don’t sell circular/round trackpads it seems.
I guess getting them from a steam controller is the only option?
Maybe they sell them on non-Chinese sites though? No idea
They are Cirque trackpads. You can get them from many places, Mouser being a good source.
Still odd that they don’t sell on aliexpress, and I looked both with ‘circular’ as well as ‘Cirque’.
As for Mouser, thanks for the hint but I’m in the EU and US shops are not for me.
Still good to know for other readers tough.