The Nine is a tiny 18-key split, wireless, ergonomic split keyboard, heavily inspired by Ben Vallack's Piano 2. I tried out his design and loved it, but wanted to tweak the physical layout a bit to fit my hands and my use case better. It uses Nice!Nano V2 BLE-equipped controllers, and (optionally) Nice!View displays to show information like the connected BLE profile, battery level and layer name. You can read more about this keyboard and the design decisions I made here: Introducing the Nine keyboard and Nine keyboard Part 2 - the case.
The PCB was generously sponsored by PCBWay, who paid for the boards. I also got the case printed at PCBWay but paid for that myself. They did a fantastic, high quality job with both and I can highly recommend them. I would like to thank them for their sponsorship and support.
Note that while I provide the .stl files for a case which fits the PCB here and works well, I will probably tweak the case (and possibly the PCB design) a bit in future to provide better protection for the displays and controllers, and also possibly provide more options for case designs. If/when I do that, I will add a 'v2' of the case and PCB if necessary here. I may also create a version using the Seeed XIAO BLE controller, which is smaller physically and also slightly cheaper to buy (which is why I have called this repo 'nine-nano'!) In the meantime, I have provided all the necessary source KiCad files and the Shapr3D source files if you want to adapt either design.
All the PCB files are here. If you want to fabricate and build the keyboard, the easiest route is to upload the zip file containing the Gerbers to a PCB fabrication house like PCBWay. I have written a build guide which should help you when soldering and assembling the board.
If you need information about how the board is wired up, PDFs of the schematic and PCB are provided, or you can open the project in KiCad to alter the design yourself.
The .stl files needed to build the case, as well as the Shapr3D source file are in the case directory. You will also find a file there with a basic 3D model of the PCB plus the main board components if you need a reference to build your own case. It's pretty bad though, as I couldn't figure out how to export the model with the surface-mounted components included. If you know how to improve this, please let me know --- it would have made designing the case much easier!
The build guide includes a section on getting the case printed and assembled too. Note that I have only got the case printed in resin, so I cannot guarantee that the tolerances etc. would be correct for printing in PLA or other materials.
The ZMK firmware for this keyboard is in a separate repository, which you can fork if you would like to alter the keymapping. Instructions for downloading the firmware are in the build guide.
The build guide for the PCB and case can be found here.
As previously mentioned, this design is heavily inspired by Ben Vallack's Piano 2 and the layout he designed. I also used items from various repositories on Github for symbols and footprints to use in KiCad, such as perigoso's keyswitch library, footstan's kbd library, and crides kleeb library.
Many thanks to the team at PCBWay for their help and support, particularly Liam.
The case design is my own, but I was hugely inspired by Geist's TOTEM keyboard and case, and his excellent build guide. Until seeing his case, I had no idea that you could print in transparent resin, which influenced a lot of my design decisions. He also has a beautiful build guide, which my poor illustration skills cannot hope to live up to!
Last but not least, I have asked a lot of questions and had invaluable advice from many people on the ZMK and Nice Keyboards Discords, including @petejohanson and @TweetyDaBird among others --- thanks for all who gave their time to help me, or who have open sourced their PCB designs, as this was really useful to check my work as I progressed with the designs
This work is licenced with an MIT license.