Dactyl Tight Build

After reading about the tightyl on r/ergomechkeyboards, I decided to take the plunge and build my own hand-wired keyboard. The total time to assemble it was not as substantial as I expected, but there were some long gaps during the work due to not having ordered some necessary parts.

Parts

I’ve been using a gergo for about a year now, and decided that it would be nice to continue using a similar layout keyboard, but with lighter keys. The layout that I use has a number of different layers and a variant on home-row mods, so I am frequently pressing multiple keys at once. After doing some research, I settled on gateron clears, which are linear and have a spring weight of 35g. I wasn’t too sure about linear switches, having only used tactile switches before, but thought that it would be worth an experiment.

The case itself was printed locally by a friend, for the cost of one reel of plastic. This worked out pretty well for me, as they have much more experience with 3d printing than I do, and it would have been quite the detour into 3d printing to get to the point where I could produce a nice print.

Parts List

• Both halves of the tightyl case
• 50 gateron clear switches
• 50 clear translucent DSA keycaps
• 50 black translucent DSA keycaps
• 100 diodes
• 2 arduino clone microcontrollers
• dupont connector kit
• 100 heat set nuts
• 100 4mm M2.5 screws

Assembly

I followed the technique outlined in cribbit’s modern handwiring guide. My wife had a set of round-tipped needle nose pliers for jewelry making that worked really well for wrapping the legs of the diodes into rings that would fit over the legs of the switches. I purchased a wire stripper from amazon like the one mentioned in the modern handwiring guide, and it really simplified the process of stripping insulation from the solid core wire for the columns of the matrix.

For the connection to the microcontrollers I used a dupont connector kit from amazon. The stranded wire was easy to thread under the matrix and solder to the rows/columns, and the connectors fit well on the pins soldered to the microcontroller. The result was that it was easy to remove the microcontroller for debugging, which I needed to do plenty of when getting qmk setup.

QMK Setup

I used the util/new_keyboard.sh script to create the initial configuration for the tightyl in handwired/tightyl. This script worked well, and the configuration that it setup was a great starting point.

Getting the keyboard working took a bit of trial and error, though not with the feature that I would have expected: I had a lot of trouble getting the handedness detection working by setting one pin of the microcontroller high. However, reading through the split keyboard documentation in QMK provides a lot of options for handedness detection, and I ended up switching to using the unused intersection in the keyboard matrix for identifying the left side of the keyboard.

The configuration that I’ve settled on is in my qmk fork.