An Ultra-Compact 40 Percent Planck Keyboard You Can Build Yourself

Have you ever wondered why the keys on a typical keyboard are arranged in the way they are? The rows of keys are staggered, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the ideal layout. The truth is that the staggered keyboard layout is a vestigial holdover from the typewriter era, and not an ergonomic choice as many people believe. Keys had to be staggered to leave room for the mechanical bars that connected the keys to the type elements that were actually striking the paper. The Planck ortholinear keyboard layout completely ignores that outdated convention, Radomir Dopieralski's Dorsch 48k Keyboard is a 40% DIY mechanical keyboard that you can build yourself to take advantage of that layout.

It’s safe to say that you learned to type on a standard staggered keyboard, which means you’ll have to retrain yourself and develop new muscle memory to type quickly and efficiently on an ortholinear keyboard like this. Many people, however, report that they were eventually able to type more quickly on ortholinear keyboards. The primary benefit of a Planck keyboard is that it is more compact. In most cases, all of the keys with the exception of the space bar are exactly the same size, which means you don’t have extra space being taken up by larger keys like Shift or Enter. With some keyboards, including this one, even more space is saved by entirely omitting unnecessary keys. How often do you even use those function keys anyway?

The Dorsch 48k Keyboard design is a 40 percent keyboard and only has 47 keys — two spaces in the grid are taken up by the double-size space key. The result is a keyboard that is about half as wide as a full-size 100 percent keyboard, and also less deep. It’s very thin, too, thanks to the Kailh Low Profile “Choc” key switches and matching key caps. Those key switches are soldered directly to the custom PCB. The keyboard matrix is monitored by a Microchip ATSAMD21E18A-MU microcontroller and programmed with CircuitPython. You don’t have to worry if you do occasionally use the function keys, home key, and so on, because the code for this keyboard supports layers. That means you can use special keys like the “Super” key to change the character or purpose of the standard keys. For instance, if you want to enter an exclamation point, you would press Raise + Shift + Q. That’s because Q, !, and 1 all share the same key. It takes getting used to, but is worth the effort if you need a very small keyboard.