_a thing that is fanciful or odd
Whimsy
What started as a passion project, grew legs and "Whimsy" was born. The process of designing and building a keyboard from scratch has been a huge learning curve and something completely out of my normal wheelhouse yet here we are... a fully custom, 40% keyboard with some tasty extras.
Prior to Whimsy, I didn’t have a clue about how to design or make a keyboard but I quickly came to the realisation that wanted to produce something I could be proud of and actually use as my daily board. After a random conversation, some brief research and a bit of thinking, it was decided to create a board which combines some of the most favourable qualities in a custom keyboard. The list wasn’t massive but the main features that this keyboard project needed were a rotary encoder, to be USB-C, have an OLED display and around 40(ish)% in size... this would surely be absolute perfection in a keyboard.
Enjoy 👇
Keep up to date with Whimsy progress...
If you have any interest in Whimsy at this stage I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts/feedback. If you've got a couple of minutes spare to fill out the interest form linked below, i would greatly appreciate it.
The IC is due to launch on GeekHack and Reddit sometime in the next couple of weeks so look out for that.. in the meantime, please feel free to contact me via email, Twitter, Reddit or Instagram and I’ll aim to get back to you with more details as and when I have them.
Thanks
There's a number of people that Whimsy wouldn't have been possible without.
Jasper for basically being there at every step, creating the firmware, listening to me ramble on and giving me all the motivation to do this, Nath for the case design and for letting me bore him to death about keyboards, Dave and Ben from MBUK for just being incredible and helping with everything to get the prototypes kitted out and finally, Matt a.k.a Worldspawn for helping at literally all stages regarding the PCB design.
Genuinely couldn't have got Whimsy anywhere further than an idea without the help from these awesome people 🙏
Todo List
- Finalise v1 PCB
- Finish Case Design
- Pricing
- Build/test firmware
- 3D renders
Calendar
- 30th March 2020 - Interest Check Starts
- 19th April 2020 - Interest Check Ends
- TBC - Group Buy Opens
Update Log
Legal & Notices
As mentioned, Whimsy is my first keyboard design and build, and as such, I provide this PCB as reference for designing keyboard PCBs without liability and without any guarantees regarding its functionality, as expressed in the MIT license under which Whimsy is licensed. Using any aspect of the Whimsy design within your projects will require a will to do research and to learn the workings of them, potentially fixing issues if they exist.
Whimsy was heavily inspired by the awesome UT47.2 by aio3/keyhive, which itself was inspired by 40percent.club's Gnap keyboard, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Keycaps used within the renders of Whimsy are based off Zambumon's fantastic GMK Nautilus set and have been tweaked slightly for the purpose of producing said renders. The renders of Whimsy contained on this page and used on Reddit/GeekHack/Instagram are not explicitly what Whimsy may appear as when physically manufactured.