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This is a talk about how you survive as a small company making high-end keyboards, and why email is so important. Why metrics are not the way to go, and why you have to both believe in yourself and your weird dreams but also actually listen to what other people are saying.

Building keyboards is nice, but the true fun begins, when you start fully designing your own. In this talk I will give a quick introduction to PCB design with the open source tool KiCad. After this talk you can start designing your own keyboards from scratch. Bring a Laptop if you want to follow along.

A behind the scenes look at how a small idea turned into months of learning about custom PCBs, 3D modeling, parts sourcing, and the messy journey between an idea and a working keyboard.

On this talk I will go over what motivated me to research the process of manufacturing a keyboard from the concept stage until sourcing the manufacturing of custom PCBs, all steps in-between and the challenges that come with having to learn several new skills in order to bring the first prototypes to life.

A personal project on a quest to find the perfect way to type with one hand. After a hand injury which left me unable to type with both hands for a long period, I set out to design the perfect keyboard for one handed typing. I'd like to talk about the full design journey of how I iterated through the design, the type of tricks I had to use to arrive to the current version. The final result is a keyboard that's ergonomic and suitable even for programming jobs.

In 2020 I looked at the small displays on my desk and asked: would one fit into a keycap? Answering that question took six years.

The first displays almost fit. The next ones fit, but their cables were too short, so I soldered an extension onto every single one. I changed the microcontroller three times, once because of the chip shortage. I learned KiCad for this project and threw away my first PCB layout. I went from one key to 8, to 20, to a full split keyboard. Then the displays glitched, and I had to find out why one chip could not drive 36 of them. I wrote my own font converter to support any language, and I generate the case from code so it follows every PCB change.

Then came the software. The keyboard has to know which program is active and show the right shortcuts, on Windows, Linux and macOS, over a slow connection. That part stayed unfinished for a long time. The last mile finally happened with the help of AI. More on that in the talk.

The result is the PolyKybd Split72, a keyboard where every key tells you what it does.