@comotellamas For me the Y key is easy to reach. The keys I have the most problems with are the 1 and 0 keys. My pinkies are short relative to my other fingers so it's easier for me to reach for the 1 and 0 with my ring fingers. Then again, I do that with conventional keyboards too.
The caps are what they call "unicorn vomit", a grab-bag from a bunch of different key cap sets. Currently the keyboard's even more unicorn-vomitty now but more importantly all the keys are properly labeled. It took some effort last year trading caps with other keyboard hackers to achieve it.
If you have some soldering/assembly experience, you'll find the Iris is reasonably easy to build (Most keyboard are!) and require very little in actual electronics knowledge.
Budget around $150: $18 for PCBs, $43 for the case and plates, $15 for a pair of ATmega32 controllers, $6 for other electronic parts. Sky's the limit for switches and key caps (you could literally spend several hundred on each) but start at $15-ish for switches (mehkee.com and novelkeys.xyz are excellent sources for Chinese switches; arrow.com is good if you want actual made-in-Germany Cherry switches). Absolute cheapest complete set of key caps will be $20-ish from China and $80-and-up for US-made caps, $50 will be a good target price for something that looks good and feels solid. The better Chinese key cap manufacturers are making decent stuff.
Feel free to email me at my account name @gmail. Or if you're on metafilter, memail me there.
https://keeb.io/collecti...
@comotellamas For me the Y key is easy to reach. The keys I have the most problems with are the 1 and 0 keys. My pinkies are short relative to my other fingers so it's easier for me to reach for the 1 and 0 with my ring fingers. Then again, I do that with conventional keyboards too.
The caps are what they call "unicorn vomit", a grab-bag from a bunch of different key cap sets. Currently the keyboard's even more unicorn-vomitty now but more importantly all the keys are properly labeled. It took some effort last year trading caps with other keyboard hackers to achieve it.
The "Deploy" key doesn't work on Fridays, right? ;)
If you have some soldering/assembly experience, you'll find the Iris is reasonably easy to build (Most keyboard are!) and require very little in actual electronics knowledge.
Budget around $150: $18 for PCBs, $43 for the case and plates, $15 for a pair of ATmega32 controllers, $6 for other electronic parts. Sky's the limit for switches and key caps (you could literally spend several hundred on each) but start at $15-ish for switches (mehkee.com and novelkeys.xyz are excellent sources for Chinese switches; arrow.com is good if you want actual made-in-Germany Cherry switches). Absolute cheapest complete set of key caps will be $20-ish from China and $80-and-up for US-made caps, $50 will be a good target price for something that looks good and feels solid. The better Chinese key cap manufacturers are making decent stuff.
Feel free to email me at my account name @gmail. Or if you're on metafilter, memail me there.