My latest ergo design: the Solanum

I haven’t had much time to devote to my hobbies since moving, but I’m quite proud to have finally finished a project that I’ve had in flight for the past several months. This is my latest keyboard design: a 34-key split that I call the Solanum.

In some respects, it represents a return to my roots with many familiar features from the egg58: widened spacing, a Pro Micro, TRRS for wired split, and reversible PCBs. However, 34 keys is the smallest key count for any of my designs yet. I’ve been using a layout of this size for most of the year, but this is the first creation of my own to be designed for it.

I have integrated some quality-of-life features that I first tested on other boards: tenting puck support (from the Chicklet), and an onboard JST and power switch for wireless boards (as on the Tamago60).

I also tried to make this board as easy as possible to hand solder. I stuck to through-hole components (with the exception of the hotswap sockets) and opted for a diodeless design.

After almost three years of building and testing weird little keyboards, I think I have mostly settled on what I like. While I don’t think I’m likely to deviate too far from the features I’ve described above, I am still willing to try new things.

In that vein, the Solanum introduces some changes I consider a bit more experimental like a reachy pinky key, more aggressive stagger, and some mild splay. It’s too early to say whether these will all stick around in the next revision, but so far it feels like a pretty comfortable keyboard.

As always, this design is open-source, and can be found on my GitHub.