⌨️ Keyboards

I've been using this Ferris Sweep keyboard since Summer 2024, in both wired and wireless flavors. I love it!

Keymap

This layout is largely Miryoku, though I've collapsed many layers together and discarded features I wasn't using.

I've switched from Colemak-DH to Focal, which I found in Pascal Getreuer's guide, and I'm liking it so far.

I've also added some horizontal combos inspired by urob's zmk-config. These give me left-handed copy-paste while I'm mousing, and, as a vim user, escape on the home row. They also make all the bracket pairs much easier to remember!

Local Builds

To build the firmware and draw the keymap, there's a small shell script that uses a Docker image.

usage: build [-I] firmware [-k <keyboard>]
       build [-I] keymap [-k <keyboard>]
       build [-I] shell

  global options:
    -I             build docker image

  commands:
    firmware       build keyboard firmware (default)
    keymap         draw keyboard keymap
    shell          start an interactive shell in the docker container

  options:
    -k <keyboard>  select keyboard

  keyboards:
    ferris_sweep (default)
    ferris_sweep_wired
    corne_min

Directory Layout

I've gone a little nuts here, far afield from the typical zmk-config or qmk_userspace repository. Part of this is for fun, and part is because I'm thinking about starting to make keyboards someday, and it's fun to think about all the ergogen or kicad or whatever files just slotting in here neatly, along with their attendant tooling living in the docker image.

But it's not too weird. If you squint, things should look a little familiar here:

.
├── bin
│   └── build
├── etc
│   └── keymap-drawer.yml
├── opt
│   ├── Dockerfile
│   ├── packages.txt
│   └── requirements.txt
├── share
│   ├── doc
│   │   ├── corne_min.svg
│   │   ├── ferris_sweep_wired.svg
│   │   ├── ferris_sweep.svg
│   │   └── keyboard.jpg
│   ├── fish
│   │   ├── vendor_completions.d
│   │   │   └── build.fish
│   │   └── vendor_conf.d
│   │       └── keyboards-activate.fish
│   └── git
│       └── hooks
│           └── pre-commit
├── src
│   ├── qmk
│   │   ├── keyboards
│   │   │   └── ferris
│   │   │       └── sweep
│   │   │           └── keymaps
│   │   │               └── matthewtodd
│   │   │                   ├── config.h
│   │   │                   ├── keymap.c
│   │   │                   └── rules.mk
│   │   └── qmk.json
│   └── zmk
│       └── config
│           ├── common.dtsi
│           ├── corne_min.conf
│           ├── corne_min.keymap
│           ├── cradio.conf
│           ├── cradio.keymap
│           └── west.yml
└── README.md

20 directories, 23 files

Links

This is really my first foray into weird keyboards, and it was a little hard to get oriented at first, so here are some links in case you're curious yourself.

• The board and case are from Boardsource.
• The switches are Ambients nocturnals.
• The keycaps are Chicago Stenographer (via this fork), 3D-printed at jlc3dp.
• This travel case works really well.