LNlnyan·Feb 21, 2025Submission
Guidelines for designing a custom Topre keyboard (2017)
2 points · Open discussiontomsmalley
custom-topre-guide
Learning & Reference2022–2025
tomsmalley / custom-topre-guide
custom-topre-guide
Guidelines for designing a custom Topre keyboard
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Guidelines for designing a custom Topre keyboard
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
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| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
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3 sourcesGuidelines for designing a custom Topre keyboard (2017)
1 points · Open discussionCame across this while combing through my comments and thought I'd already answered, so pardon the delay.
People have certainly tried [1][2], but the big issue in the design is that the switches don't operate as a standard on/off (trivial to detect), but are instead capacitive, in that the current passing through the electrocapacitive pad on the PCB is somewhere between 1 and 0 (exclusive bounds, iirc, and simplified) at all times, dependent on how far the 'switch' above it is being pressed. This old repo seems to explain it well: https://github.com/tomsmalley/custom-topre-guide
Price and marketability are also issues. Split keebs are niche, ortho keebs are niche, EC keebs are niche, and you're talking about fusing those three together. People would 100% buy in, but it would probably be a microscopic market, to the point where the project
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would be financially lossy, even if you were selling them for $400 apiece.
The closest you/one might get for now is by buying two of these[3], unless you're dedicated enough to DIY.
[1]: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=97975.0
[2]: https://aficionerds.com/en/blog/20210205_crkbd_ec/
[3]: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=106685.0 (Groupbuy is ended, so you'd have to rely on aftermarket, which would probably be tiny and marked up)