Ever since Donut.js has had live captions for their talks every month, I've been curious about how people can learn to type that fast. That led me down quite the rabbit hole of internet research, where I stumbled into the open source stenography community, largely pioneered by Mirabai Knight, who does the captions for Donut.js! (small world!)
I thought it would be fun to try to learn some basic stenography, so I set out to find a keyboard for this. There are several existing QWERTY keyboards you can use, (the keyboard needs to be able to support pressing several keys at the same time, which most keyboards, especially laptop keyboards, do not), and there are a few custom keyboards you can build as well.
I first learned about the Gherkin keyboard from the Plover Blog. It's a tiny keyboard with 3 rows of 10 keys, where the keys are arranged in a grid rather than staggered like typical keyboards. It's commonly referred to as a "30% keyboard" in the mechanical keyboard community. This key arrangement lends itself well to the steno key layout, which looks like this.
The steno keyboard requires 24 or 26 keys (depending on whether you count the S and * as one or two keys), so this 30-key keyboard has more than enough to handle it.
Being brand new to stenography, as well as the mechanical keyboard community, it was a real trick to learn all the new terminology needed to piece this together. I haven't actually bought a keyboard in a long time, much less assembled one from scratch.
The Gherkin kit is really well done, but that's still way more soldering than I am comfortable doing myself. Thankfully, Paul on the Plover chat was offering to do all the soldering if anyone would just ship all the parts to his address. I gladly took him up on that offer, and quickly placed an order from three different online stores for all the pieces.
Electronics Part List
- Gherkin Kit from Spacecat.design (just the PCBs)
- Gateron Switches (30 Clear) from Flashquark (this is the actual key mechanism)
- Arduino Pro Micro
- 1N4148 Diodes (50)
Eventually these all arrived at Paul's house, and he sent some in-progress pictures while he was soldering.
In order to get the whole thing to be thinner, he even filed down the solder joints on the Arduino that's on the bottom, to save a few millimeters.
Final Assembly
The soldered board showed up in my mailbox, which was pretty magical. (Thanks again Paul!)
I then needed to attach the two plates and add the keycaps.
Mechanical Part List
- Blue and Grey G20 Keycaps from pimpmykeyboard.com (30 Blue BCT, 10 Grey GDE)
- M2 x 4mm Screws (28)
- M2 x 5mm Standoffs (14)
- Clear rubber feet
The keycaps were the hardest part to figure out, since there are so many options. I needed ones compatible with the switches I got, which are the "Cherry MX" style. I settled on the "G20" style, which are slimmer than normal keyboards, and perfectly square and flat. I bought two different colors, using the blue ones for the keys that are actually on the steno keyboard, and grey for the unused keys.
It took me a few tries to get screws and standoffs of the right size, since I wanted this to be as thin as possible. I ended up with 5mm standoffs, and 4mm screws. Adding the thickness of the PCB, the screws end up almost meeting in the middle of the standoffs, and it leaves just barely enough room for the Arduino sandwiched between the two boards.
Lastly, I wanted to find a nice case for this. Turns out there is a case for a portable hard drive that fits this surprisingly well, once you cut out the little middle flap.
So that's been an exciting adventure so far! Now I just have to get through the somewhat daunting number of steno lessons and practice practice practice!
