Joe Scotto's Latest Hand-Wired Keyboard Takes a Boomerang — or Batarang — As Inspiration

Free-to-build keyboard maker Joe Scotto is back with another design, this time with a boomerang — or possibly Batarang — inspired curved design: the ScottoRang.

"The ScottoRang is a 34-key split monoblock ergonomic 16×16mm Choc spaced keyboard with a central 128×64 OLED display," Scotto says of his latest keyboard design. "I used Choc Pro Red switches along with my custom ScottoCaps (Scooped) in 16×16mm spacing. The OLED display shows the current active layer and I have plans to one day do something more interesting like animations."

Like most — but not all — of Scotto's keyboards, the ScottoRang is hand-wired, meaning there's no printed circuit board inside. Instead, the switches are held within a 3D-printed framework and wired to each other with rigid and flexible wires, while an RP2040 Zero, built around Raspberry Pi's popular RP2040 microcontroller, sits at the keyboard's heart running the open-source QMK firmware and handling both USB connectivity and the OLED display.

"This board was extremely hard to build," Scotto admits of the design, which uses an ortholinear-style grid layout but split into two sections held at an angle to better promote ergonomic wrist placement, "as it's super thin meaning I had to do a lot of work to make sure I could get it closed."

Scotto has a history of building interesting keyboard designs and releasing them under a free-to-build license, including the ScottoChoczard, the ultra-thin ScottoWing, a one-handed input device inspired by the Frogpad, the unusual-layout ScottoKatana, and the ScottoDeck, and the ergonomic Bluetooth-connected Scotto63 — though the Scotto69 "Nice Edition," stands out as being the first to feature a custom PCB rather than having its components hand-wired inside the 3D-printed case.

More information is available on Scotto's website, while design files are available alongside all Scotto's other keyboards on GitHub under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license; a currently-empty folder in the repository suggests a variant built using a custom PCB is in the works.