ranzware
Split keyboards are not for everyone. But if you fancy the hands-spread typing experience and don’t feel like paying $200+ for something like the Kinesis Freestyle Edge, Japanese YouTube channel Nomoluk Report has shown a quick and easy method for cutting a regular one in half. Okay, I lied. Nothing about this looks quick and easy at all.
As spotted by Hackaday, Nomuluk Report has done the unthinkable and taken a rather-fancy-looking saw blade to a regular mechanical keyboard and chopped it in half, like an amateur magician having a very bad day.
After hacking the innocent keyboard into what looks like an ignominious death, the channel then gets to work with a soldering iron and wires the traces back together, creating a device that very much looks like it’s begging to be put out of its misery. A quick bit of cable conduit wizardry later, and the device looks perfectly usable—although still begging for its electronic life.
My favourite part comes at 1:37, where the hacked-in-half keeb is demonstrated to only work on one side before it’s wired back together. Who would have thought chopping a circuit board in half would ruin at least some of its functionality? Not me, I tell you what.
“I regret why I started doing this,” the narrator says as they wire together the disparate halves. “The detailed work was too hard so I escaped and came to see the sunset.”
Looking at that nightmare of wires, I’m really not surprised. Still, the end result looks surprisingly functional. Even the RGB lighting appears to work, although the spacebar is left dangling off of one side of the board.
The switch itself needed to remain on the right-hand side for a “clean” cut, so there it remains, a grim reminder of the intact keeb that once was.
Later in the video a split membrane keyboard is shown wired together with a similar method, although this poor peripheral didn’t even receive conduit surgery to tidy up its trace wiring. If you’re a keyboard enthusiast, look away now. This really isn’t pretty.
If I was to describe my face while watching this video with a single word, I think I would choose “aghast.” Anyway, it’s done now, and both keyboards look to be fully functional. If, it must be said, not entirely happy with their new lives as two separate-yet-ever-connected peripherals.
There’s hackery and then there’s, well, hackery. Still, if you too have a desire for a split keyboard and happen to have an old model lying around… leave it alone. Keyboards have enough of a terrible existence if you ask me, taking a relentless bashing from our greasy fingertips and absorbing spillages, crumbs, and in my keebs case, dubious writing.
Leave this one to the, err, professionals. Or don’t, if you’ve got some sort of grudge against regular keyboards that simply must be fulfilled. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling slightly woozy. I think I need to go for a lie down.
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Kurt Indovina
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