Ergodox Beginnings

Just about a year ago I purchased a used ErgoDox EZ with Gatreon brown switches. During shipping, a few of the switches ended up getting broken. After some botched soldering attempts by my son and me, I gave up and let the keyboard sit in a drawer.

Well, a few weeks ago I had the soldering iron out and decided to go ahead and fix the switches. I didn’t have any replacement browns so I used purple zealios. The broken switches were on punctuation so I don’t believe the difference in actuation force will impact my typing day to day. After using wire to bypass areas in the PCB that had been damaged, I finally had the keyboard working perfectly.

The keycaps are from drop’s /dev/tty set and don’t fit very well. It’s also missing a few key caps… but this works for now. I ordered a new set of ergodox keycaps from kbdfans.com, but shipping is going to take a while.

So far, I’m really liking this keyboard. While I’ve been using split keyboards for a while, the ortholinear layout of the ergodox is taking some time to get used to. I believe that this is primarily because I don’t use all of my fingers on my right hand to type. Immediately after plugging this keyboard in I was only typing about 13 words per minute. After 2 weeks or so of occasional use, I’m up to about 50 words per minute. Once I get back to my normal 80+ I’ll consider using this keyboard full time.