sofle

Tracking my adventures in split-keyboard land with the Sofle V2 with design choices heavily influenced by tomsaleeba/ergoslab as well as the original josefadamicik/SofleKeyboard projects, as well as other layouts I find as I look around.

Introduction

Until this project, I had never worked on a real soldering project, so there were a lot of, shall we say, learning opportunities. Like, a whole bunch of learning opportunities.

• Diodes Doing Wheelies
• Desoldering Pro Micro
• "Alternative" Removal Process

Additionally, I've only ever had one mechanical keyboard, never a split keyboard... or layers, or ortholinear, or QMK, or really even C++.

In the end, though, I'm VERY pleased with how things turned out!

• Key Layout via Keyboard Layout Editor
• Key Caps available via from kbdfans

A note on the caps: they don't have a homing mark on F and J, but after using them for a while I've found homing marks unnecessary due to the SA profile, knobs, and layout.

If you want to add homing indicators, I found two options:

• Ball Bearing Mods (which seem like an awesome-but-more-destructive-than-I-want for these caps)
• Just use a piece of tape (which slid off after a day or two for me)

Key learnings

Before we really dive into my build and I bore you to death with "mah layouts, let me show you themz", here are some things I learned that might actually help you:

1. International orders take a long time. My order took about a month from Vietnam.
2. The official Build Guide is great
3. Soldering
   • SOCKET YOUR MCUs, but double-check your pin types:
     • All of the low-profile pins I found were round; you will need both male and female round pins.
     • Round pins and Square pins are not compatible
     • "Pitch" Refers to the distance between pins; you NEED 2.54mm. Do not buy 2.00mm.
   • Solder matters. Junk solder will leave your welds sharp, making it hard to clean flux residue
   • Avoid melting your board by staying around 600°F
   • The yellowish junk on your board is flux residue, and you can clean it with rubbing alcohol; you probably didn't melt your board
   • Don't be afraid to hold the iron to the PCB solder points for a bit; once they get hot enough the solder will literally flow from your iron into the joint
   • If the solder flows, but still makes a ball, you need more flux. I started with Pen flux, but save yourself time and order some Paste Flux, the pen is for when you know what you're doing
   • You'll make crappy welds when you start, and quickly get better and be tempted to go back and "fix" them. Don't. Finish all the way through, then go back and check - When you think you've got enough practice, do 50% more practice.
4. Desoldering
   • Don't mess up, desoldering sucks
   • If you can afford it, get a Desoldering Iron
   • If you can't afford it... Find a way to. These next steps suck worse than eating ramen for a few weeks:
     • Set your iron to ~700°F to start (if you can adjust the temp)
     • Use desoldering wick
     • Always use the tip of the wick to start; if a lot is coming off the joint, try to move up the wick
     • Dip the tip of the wick into your flux paste. It'll make a mess on the board, but it will help attract the solder
     • Trim it between uses
     • Remove as much solder as you can. Ideally, the pins/parts just fall off
     • If all else fails, try to clip the pins to isolate them.
     • NEVER FORCE A PIN THROUGH: If it doesn't slip through easily, trim the wick and try again. Forcing a pin can rip out the contacts from the board - iz bad
5. Firmware
   • The ProMicro has a custom coded reset button
   • You can't flash both halves at the same time

Switches

All switches are no-tactile/no-clicky with silver being 45g, black 60g, and yellow 75g. The one black switch on the far right was due to reaching for -/_ triggering \/| too frequently. It's been working out well so far!

Layers

Via (Keyboard Layout Manager)

0 (Base)

Top-left has one Tap/Hold key for Tab/Alt (I've had my CapsLock bound to Alt for a while).

Bottom right has a =/Shift Tap/Hold.

Both Esc and Enter act as layer shifts, and there's a Alt+Shift key, which is my "Meta" key for tmux/Firefox

1 (Mouse)

This has ended up being my most useful layer. The Green keys are a fantastic stand-in for when I just need a quick thing done with the mouse (webpage that doesn't support Vimium, for example), the blue keys are VIM keys for things that need arrows.

VIM uses CTRL+W as a prefix for a lot of graphical operations, and tmux ALT+A, so throwing these in to see how I like them on row 1.

Lastly, my KVM switch is triggered by Ctrl+Ctrl+[1/2], so the two macro keys on the right take care of that.

2 (Symbols)

The original idea for this layer was inspired by tomsaleeba/ergoslab's bracket layer, but my brain just couldn't get it to stick...

Until I added the bottom layer on the left. Now making Markdown links is:

ESC+k
Name of link
ESC+ l i v o

l puts in the ], i does (, v pastes the URL, then o closes the ). Magic.

The FN keys are because they didn't have anywhere else to live after the most recent redesign.

3 (FFXIV)

Basically disables some of the keys that are bad for gaming (Tab/Alt Tap, Esc/Sym) and adds printsc.

I could probably simplify this to a flag eventually...

4 (Gamez)

Ortholinear WASD is even weirder than normal, so shifting the keys to the right was a necessity.

After playing for a while, I realized shifting the top and bottom rows were unnecessary and confusing. Additionally, the right-side is sorta a passive hotkey system; by default games don't acknowledge the CTRL key is pressed, so the key just registers as the alpha, but if you're setting a custom mapping, it'll see it and you'll have a new hotkey.

Observations

Hurdles

I learned to type wrong, I think. I frequently used my right index finger to press b, but with the sofle that'd be quite a reach :)

That's a pretty small issue, though, when compared to the fact that I've ALWAYS used my left pointer finger to push c. This dramatically throws off c, v, and b in an Ortho layout. That'll be the largest learning curve in this process.

Other complications are remembering that my right thumb can't hit space (resulting in a lot of prematurely sent messages), and attempting to hit the old locations for ESC and BACKSPACE.

Victories

The biggest wins so far are mostly on the MOUSE layer, which is a bit surprising considering how busy that layer ended up being. Controlling the mouse with WASD-type controls (ESDF, technically) is incredibly useful, and having HJKL as arrow keys is everything I'd hoped it would be.

Also, flashing the firmware quickly means that I don't ingrain any bad habits by using the wrong keys for too long. I do wish I could flash both keyboards without having to play musical chairs with cords, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

And good goat do my back and neck feel better already. Like, WAY better.

// Dev note: regex for firmware->configurator:'<,'>s%\v([^, ]+)%"\1"%g