I was looking for a nice IDE integrated on-chip debugging setup for STM32 chips and the STLink V3 on macOS. Neither OpenOCD nor st-util worked out of the box with CLion. I didn’t want to use gdb directly. STCubeIDE works great, but I don’t want to use STCubeMX projects. I’m writing firmware using chibios right now. I wanted something which works for any RTOS without much hastle. So I took some inspiration from how STCubeIDE works. Read more

Working on electronics makes me appreciate how easy software engineering is. Why is that? Personally I can work efficiently when I have a tight feedback loop and when I can simulate the environment I’m working in. This allows me to make small changes and quickly converge my design towards the desired state I want to reach. With electronics establishing a tight feedback loop is much more complicated. Assuming you layed down your schematic, sanity checked all nets and verified your PCB with design rule checks you eventually end up ordering a PCB. Read more

Today I published the first batch of PCBs on Github which I designed while working on the Ganymede. These breakout board PCBs helped me as a novice in electronics with the development of my split keyboard. Included in this batch are: a breakout board for choc switches. It’s a 2x2 column-to-row matrix, with sockets for hot swapping. This is very useful for debugging one other breakout boards as it’s easy to connect some buttons. Read more

When I started working on my own ARM based, split ergonomic keyboard I decided to call it “Kepler”. I posted about this on keebtalk and users dexie@ and wilba@ were kind enough to point out that there’s already another keyboard called Kepler. So I decided to rename the Kepler to Ganymede. I’ve updated the Github repository accordingly.

In March 2018 I started out my ergonomic keyboard journey with an Ergodox EZ. There are many good things which can be said about the Ergodox EZ. It is a very reliable keyboard. It’s super easy to customize using the EZs web-based editor and updating it with teensy works great. The reason I started looking at alternative keyboards was because my hands are a little too small to use it efficiently. Read more

I bought two ErgoDox EZ keyboards and then spent more time & money to bring them to feature parity. Here’s why and how. Background In March 2018 I got my first Ergodox EZ and started to learn how to type on a split keyboard. In order to reach fluency faster I carried my ErgoDox EZ to work and back every day. This way I could type on it all the time. Read more