ATLAS Keyboard

Total Time Spent (review 1): 34 hrs Total Time Spent (review 2): 36 hrs

June 29th

today i did some research into split keybaord layouts and tools for designing them. i learned how to use Ergogen to define a keyboard layout and designed this! i'm gonna use choc switches and low profile keycaps, and try to give the keyboard a clean, industrial look.

This is the current layout ive settled on, but it'll 100% change once i get it and start typing on it :3

time spent: 5 hrs

(i am a very slow worker and incredibly indecisive lol)

July 1st

i figued out how to use outlines in ergogen, and that allowed me to create this outline for the keyboad:

i also learned how to turn the Ergogen yaml file into a KiCAD pcb and with a microcontroller, switches, and diodes, and automate the creation of the matrix net (?) so i dont have to do it all in a schematic! (for me as a first timer, this was 100% slower than it would have been to do manually in a schematic in KiCAD, but i was already too far in and now if i want to make another keyboard in the future, i know how to do it in a way that i can rapidly iterate :D )

tomorrow im going to add the rotary encoders, and route the whole pcb !

time spent 5 hrs

July 2nd

i found this super cool diy scroll-wheel style encoder that will make it a lot easier to use with 1 thumb to navigate text than an ec11 style encoder! (i'm hoping using these is allowed since its a super small part of the project, and i don't own a 3d printer so iterating something like this to a workable state would be an absolute nightmare (if not ill just swap them out with some (less usable + more expensive) ec11 encoders))

anyways, i made a few tiny changes to the outline on the ergogen file, got it to actually make the matrix for me, and finished routing the left half of the pcb and i think it looks pretty good :) ill do the right half tomorrow hopefully

time spent: 6 hrs

July 3rd

huge day today i finished routing the right half of the board and made some minor changes to some of the parts (added mounting holes, normalized microcontroller location, created a minor design for the silkscreen)

then i figured out how to use ergogen to export a dxf for the plate, and imported that to fusion and began modeling a case. my initial design totally flopped so that was like 4 of my hours today lol

anyways, heres the case i ended up going with. Its a sandwich mount without the top frame in order to keep this keyboard super low profile.

here's the stl's i exported that i plan on printing, i added a little channel on the side that i can slide stands into to adjust the tent angle in the future if i want since thats something that's important to me.

finally, i created a BOM and added a bunch of relevant files to this repo :)

time spent: 14 hrs

July 4th and 5th

Not a lot to report, just wrote the qmk firmware for each half of the keybaord, and made a readme :3 I think im about ready to submit!!

no photos for today since they would just be screenshots of vscode, and you can see exactly what i did in ./firmware!

time spent: 4 hrs

July 7th

created reference schematic files, since my reviewer asked for them

time spent: 2 hrs