Category: electronics

It’s been almost a year since I wrote my last update about Sofle Keyboard. At that time, I had one prototype of Sofle V2 on my table and was happy with the state of the design. My attention moved onto other projects and hobbies and I didn’t really feel like evolving the design at all. Recently I have built my second (only!) Sofle V2 build and realized a lot has happened for Sofle since the last time and it might be nice to write an update.

This project an example of how one project can lead to another. I have recently revisited an old hobby of mine - building and painting scale models. Even though the resulting model is a work of a beginner with many flaws I still wanted to have some nice pictures of the result. And it wasn’t for the first time it crossed my mind that it would be nice to have an automatic rotating turntable so I could easily make a 360 video of something I made.

Would you believe this was my first project with ESP32? So far I had some experience only with ESP8266. I must admit I fell in love with ESP32 and I am never going back.

Note: I had this article in my draft folder for several months and forgot about it. So I am giving it just a quick polish and publishing it now.

It’s been half a year since I published my articles telling a story why and how I modified an existing design for a split DIY keyboard (Lilly58) and created one tailored to my preferences - SofleKeyboard. I already started to experiment with more modifications.

It was early pandemic when my employer switched to the work-from-home mode and I realized I have a bit more free time since my commute times dropped to zero. Apart from keyboard stuff, I had no nice project in progress that wouldn’t involve waiting for PCB manufacturing or parts. So, what could I build from things I have at home? What about those 2 cheap geared DC motors, those 2 wheels, some micro, IMU unit. Hmm. I see a 2-wheeled self-balancing robot here. I always wanted to build one and learn how they work.

Update: for an up-to-date and improved build guide go to the SofleKeyboard’s website.

This article is partly a build log and partly a build guide for SofleKeyboard (introduced in the previous article) ~~since there’s no build guide for the keyboard yet and there are already people who would like to build it. ~~

In the first article, I explained my experience with custom keyboards and my requirements regarding a layout for my next DIY keyboard. I have also promised there will be another article featuring a custom keyboard with such a layout.

Behold, this is SofleKeyboard - a 6×4+5 keys column-staggered split keyboard with encoder support. Based on Lily58, Corne, and Helix keyboards.

In the previous post in this series, I wrote about several prototyping steps for this project. In this article, I am going to describe the final version.