Ftraqtyl Keyboard

The Ftraqtyl is a family member of the Dactyl-Manuform family of keyboards with added trackball support for finger-operated trackballs.

The genealogy goes roughly like this, with no claim to be accurate:

• Dactyl: Clojure!
• ManuForm: thumb cluster
• Dactyl-ManuForm: combination
• Dactyl-Manuform Mini: Mini thumb cluster
• carbonfet: new cluster
• crystalhand: palm rests
• /u/qqurn, /u/drashna, /u/noahjoseph: trackball mad lads.

Other variants you should check out

• https://github.com/okke-formsma/dactyl-manuform-tight/
• https://github.com/geoffder/dometyl-keyboard

Shoutout also to the folks from OhKeycaps who inadvertently got me started on this journey.

Notable Changes

• Trackball holder for the fingers (!) of the right hand.
• Trackballs don't use dowels or ball bearings, but press-fit steel balls. I prefer the feel of this, but might try BTUs also.
• Tighter vertical spacing, works for MT3 keycaps.
• Tighter horizontal spacing for first and last column. First column also slanted inwards. Last column splayed a bit.
• Three button cluster based off the "mini" cluster.
• Palm rests without silicone pads.
• Rolling rotary encoders (like a proper mouse wheel).
• Support for 34mm and 44mm trackballs.

Generate OpenSCAD and STL models

This requires the unreleased (yet) version of scad-clj, you should be able to clone scad-clj and run lein jar && lein install. (This will be obsolete once farrellm/scad-clj#49 has been resolved).

To create everything, just run lein generate && make -j4 all, otherwise:

• Run lein repl, enter: (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 render and export STL files, either from UI or using openscad --export-format binstl -o right.stl things/right.scad

License

Copyright © 2015-2024 Matthew Adereth, Tom Short, Leo Lou, carbonfet, crystalhands, and Ulrich Spörlein.

The source code for generating the models is distributed under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.

The generated models are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).