Thursday, 12th May, 2022

I’m amazing. Amazing at spending so much time looking at web frameworks, CSS, layouts, themes, static generators, blogging software, and yet making no progress whatsoever in regards to any changes or, more importantly, writing anything. 😫

My parts for the keyboard I’m building arrived. They included a nice little stroopwafel and sticker in with it, which was fun. The PCBs have just been shipped, although I picked the cheapest and slowest shipping method, so it could still be 2-4 weeks before they arrive. The new heads for my soldering iron arrived too. I could look at the firmware and start thinking about the layout and getting those files ready - in fact I can even flash them to the controllers has I have them now. That would be a good use of time this evening, getting the code and familiarising myself with QMK again….with the noobs guide I think.

The key to the success of this new keyboard, the Ferris Sweep, is going to be in the layout. It needs to be efficient, learnable and as simple as possible. Sounds easy. Some guy on youtube seemed to have a good approach to it. Need to go back and look at what he did, but the main approach seemed to be using the two thumb keys to always navigate back and forth between the layers and not rely on holdoing down keys. It’s better to tap a key to change a layer, enter the letter, then tap the opposite thumb key to return, vs. holding a thumb key or other key as a modifier. It’s more key presses, so seems a little counter-intuitive but he says the motion is more memorable as it’s a frequent pattern and therefore more practical. But we’ll see…