• Daktil Keyboard
  • Differences from the original design
  • Assembly
    • Parts / materials
    • Generating a Design
    • Printing
    • Wiring
    • Firmware setup
  • Original documentation
  • License

Daktil Keyboard

Daktil is a fork of the Dactyl, a parameterized, split-hand, concave, columnar, ergonomic keyboard. A number of them were built at Ljudmila, at the PIFlab workshop.

There's a very interesting talk about the motivation and design of the original Dactyl by Matt Addereth, its creator:

Differences from the original design

The generated model has not changed, but we used an Arudino ProMicro instead of a Teensy Arduino controller. We also did the wiring in columns instead of rows and connected the left and right parts with a spiral telephone cord with 4P4C connectors/cords.

We built some original Dactyls and some Dactyl Manuforms.

Assembly

Parts / materials

• Cherry MX switches
• Arduino Pro Micro (you can / we did / use a clone)
• IO expander (MCP23008)
• 3d print material
• 1N41 diodes (1 for each key / approx. 60)
• two 2,2 kΩ resistors
• two 4P4C telephone jacks and a spiral cord
• enameled wire

Generating a Design

Setting up the Clojure environment

• Install the Clojure runtime
• Install the Leiningen project manager
• Install OpenSCAD

Generating the design

• Run `lein repl`
• Load the file `(load-file "src/dactyl_keyboard/dactyl.clj")`
• This will regenerate the `things/*.scad` files
• Use OpenSCAD to open a `.scad` file.
• Make changes to design, repeat `load-file`, OpenSCAD will watch for changes and rerender.
• When done, use OpenSCAD to export STL files

Tips

Tips

• Some other ways to evaluate the clojure design file
• Example designing with clojure

Printing

Pregenerated STL files are available in the things directory.

Handrests prototyped at PIFcamp 2018 were designed with Blender.

Wiring

TODO

Firmware setup

TODO

Our QMK repo fork

Original documentation

You can find scans of original documents we used in the doc folder.

License

Copyright © 2015 Matthew Adereth

The source code for generating the models (everything excluding the things and resources directories is distributed under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3. The generated models and PCB designs are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License Version 4.0.