While smartphones and their touchscreens have swallowed up a large portion of the user input market, many of us still spend dozens of hours a week typing on keyboards. With that much time spent clicking and clacking the ol’ forbidden chiclets, you quickly learn your keyboard has a significant impact on your life and enjoyment thereof. With that in mind, Modern Hobbyist built his own custom mechanical keyboard a few months ago. But it wasn’t perfect and so he took the lessons he learned from that and applied them to make his dream keyboard called Hermod.
Like all of the hottest models gracing the covers of PCMag issues these days, this is a split keyboard. That means the keyboard is in two pieces, with one for each hand. If you believe the preachings of split keyboard evangelists, that is a more ergonomic arrangement. It also has a columnar staggered layout, which is another bonus to ergonomics — according to those who believe it is a bonus to ergonomics. In short, this could be very ergonomic if you like split keyboard and columnar staggered layouts.
To build it, Modern Hobbyist first had to create a layout for the Kailh Choc low profile mechanical key switches that he wanted to use. For that, he turned to keyboard-layout-editor.com, which is a really handy open-source web app that can generate patterns for all of the popular (and unpopular) keyboard layouts and switches. With the KBPlacer plugin, it can spit out a switch layout that you can then place directly into a KiCAD PCB file, which is what Modern Hobbyist did.
From there, designing the PCBs was a matter of adding the other components and routing traces. The other components include a 2.2” LCD on each side, magnetic Pogo connectors, USB-C ports, NeoPixel LEDs, an STM32 microcontroller, and all of the usual bits and bobs, like diodes and capacitors. Modern Hobbyist had PCBWay manufacturer those PCBs, then populated them himself. That required some tricky SMD soldering, but he pulled it off.
Hermod runs QMK firmware, which is always a popular choice. He did have to do a lot of tweaking to get the configuration working properly with his hardware, but it all worked out in the end.
The case is a custom 3D-printable design and the keycaps are simple blank affairs without legends. The RGB LED under-key lighting adds a bit of stylistic flair and the LCD screens show the map for the current layer. And, as a nice final touch, Hermod is expandable through modules that interface via those magnetic pogo connectors. So, Modern Hobbyist can easily add a 10-key or whatever else he needs when it is convenient.