A⋅TE⋅B1 Ortholinear Keyboard

I recently finished my A⋅TE⋅B1 keyboard. Although I just wanted to build a working keyboard, it actually sounds and feels really nice. Below a picture of the finished board:

One of the reasons to choose for an ortholinear layout was that the keyboard had to fit on my 3d printer. That limited the width to 25cm. I also decided I wanted to be able to enter some other character that I sometimes use during coding or writing. Mostly mathematical symbols. When I started with this project I kind of expected that that would be just possible: Unicode has been around since the nineties. But it is still basically ASCII. For example, to get a “ü” on a German keyboard, the keyboard just sends the key code for “[” (which happens to be at the same place on a US keyboard). The OS where you have set the keyboard to German then translates this to “ü”. It feels weird that you can’t just send over Unicode symbols. I used QMK to programme the keyboard. QMK does have an option to send over Unicode, but this makes use of OS-dependent functionality. It just send over some key combination then the Unicode hex code and then a closing key combination. Under linux this works now for me under most applications.

The keyboard was completely handsoldered.

Instructions and files to build the board can be found on github.