2016-03-23 Atreus

I have bought an assembled Atreus keyboard from Phil Hagelberg. It came with a little post-it note saying: “Assembled Atreus ​#046, Matias Clicky switches, Laquer case”, a page with a letter by Phil giving a short introduction and telling me how to update the firmware, a page with the default layout (assuming your environment uses the US keyboard layout, I guess), and an empty layout for you to work on.

Atreus

So, what did it cost?

+--------------------------------+----------------+
|      Keyboard, assembled       |   274.00 USD   |
+--------------------------------+----------------+
| Shipping from the US to        | 42.00 USD      |
| Switzerland                    |                |
| Subtotal paid via PayPal       | **321.74 CHF** |
| VAT                            | 9.20 CHF       |
| Postal Services                | 18.90 CHF      |
| Total                          | **349.84 CHF** |
+--------------------------------+----------------+

350 CHF is more pretty much 360 USD, which is what I estimated back in August.

back in August

It looks very nice, and very small, and I was really slow when I started typing because the arrow keys need a two-key combo (fn + L2) to switch to a different layer and after you’re done using the arrows, another extra key to get back. I also use a Swiss German keyboard layout on this Windows, so that will take a little extra getting used to (and mapping).

I noticed that the keyboard came only three rubber feet. I’ll have to go look four a matching fourth one.

I noticed that the Shift, Ctrl, Alt and Fn are not clicky. That surprised be as I was slowly groping for the correct keys.

I’m too slow. I cannot use the new keyboard. I wasn’t even able to type this blog post, that’s how slow it was. But I’m curious!

I was surprised by Windows trying and failing to install the Pololu A-Star 32U4 Bootloader. What is it? “The A-Star 32U4 boards and the A-Star-compatible Zumo 32U4 come with a USB bootloader that can be used in conjunction with the Arduino IDE or AVRDUDE to load new programs onto the device.” Ah! Well, not right now.

Pololu A-Star 32U4 Bootloader

I started talking to Phil about getting an assembled keyboard on August 5, 2015. Be prepared to wait for a while, if you’re not going to assemble your own!

Then again, the Keyboardio folks are still looking for a manufacturer, for all I know.

Keyboardio

https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/25882851592_ea0838a438_c.jpg

​#Atreus ​#Keyboard

Comments

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⁂

Mit drei Füsschen wackelt es nicht 😃

– Stefan 2016-03-23 16:38 UTC

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Doch natürlich, weil es darum geht, dass ich darauf tippe. 🙃

– Alex Schroeder 2016-03-23 18:32 UTC

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I also noticed that upgrading the firmware from a Mac running El Capitan doesn’t seem to work because the keyboard no longer generates an entry in `/dev` – or I’m doing it wrong. We’ll see.

– Alex Schroeder 2016-03-23 18:34 UTC

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No proper thumb keys – fail, but not too bad actually.

No keys for index fingers (yet it has empty space) – okay, now that’s a complete fail.

At some point I got myself a Japanese keyboard (one that has tiny spacebar) and jumped head first into designing my own keyboard layout. Right now it looks like this:

https://files.progarm.org/2016-03-28-033142_1060x370_scrot.png

(Turns out I’ve already mentioned it on Comments on 2015-08-16 Wooden Keyboards)

Comments on 2015-08-16 Wooden Keyboards

There are some improvements I am going to do soon, so it is still work in progress (yet it has been extremely useful for more than a year).

When you look at each key, it goes like this:

+-------------+---------------------+
|  Plain key  |     Shift + Key     |
+-------------+---------------------+
| AltGr + key | AltGr + Shift + Key |
+-------------+---------------------+

Some of these symbols, like ⌫ (backspace), are not typable characters but actual keys. I won’t go in details (I am preparing a huge blog post for that), I’ll just point out some interesting things (if anybody is interested).

• Of course **it takes time to relearn**. It wasn’t as bad as when I was switching from QWERTY to Dvorak, but yeah, it takes some nerves.
• **Chords are fine**. The fact that you have to press AltGr to type “;” does not irritate much. Same with other keys (and it would be surprising if it wasn’t so, after all on a traditional layout you have to hold Shift for any capital letter!).
• Basically anything **outside 10x3 key area is a pain to use** (except thumb keys). So you’d better throw out anything that you don’t use daily (which was done on Atreus, good). That’s why I have random unicode stuff there (I don’t use these keys all the time, but it’s good to have dedicated keys for things that I *might* need some day. You don’t have to do that, Compose key will do that just fine. But if you’re entering these symbols with compose key, then what would you do with these keys? Leave them empty?)
• On my layout AltGr can be pressed with **any of your thumbs**. While chords are fine, **one-handed chords are not**. So you can use any thumb as you feel appropriate.
• Sometimes you can’t have one key duplicated for another hand. In such cases **sticky keys** (marked as ♿) are fine. Not a joy to use, but it’s ok.
• Once you start using **Super** you’ll probably need **Hyper**. Once Hyper is fully used you’ll ask for more keys like this.
• Having **more unicode** on your keyboard is great. If your layout does not have any non-ascii symbols then go redesign it (Things to consider: ‘’ “” ｢｣ 〈〉 ←↑→↓ ≈ non-break space).
• There are many ways to see if the designer of some particular layout had any clue when he was arranging the keys (and was not just randomly placing the symbols). One of such things is **one-handed use**, and the most common use case is when your right hand is on the mouse while you still want to do something on the keyboard. On my layout you can hold AltGr with a thumb of your left hand, and then all required keys (arrows, home, end, backspace, delete, tab, escape, page down, page up, back, forward) are basically under your fingers. On Atreus, fn is located on the right side. If I understand that correctly, you can’t use it just with your left hand. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can see all they had to do was to put fn on the left side (fail?).
• When it comes to placement of special characters, you kinda have to keep in mind for what kind of a task you are optimizing your layout. My layout is optimized for regular **English texts + programming**. But a layout where “`” has better placement than “=”? What are they optimizing for? Number entering?
• **Function keys** that require modifiers are meh. Maybe it has a weird learning curve, I’m not sure yet. But one common thing is to try Alt+F4. If your keyboard/layout makes it harder then I guess you have to start over.
• There are some groups of equivalent difficulty for pressing keys. For example, **AltGr** + **Shift** + **something** is harder than **AltGr** + **something**. And that’s something you always keep in mind, but there is one interesting case related to that: closing brackets don’t necessarily have to be in the same group. Why? Because some people have it configured in such a way that a **closing bracket is placed automatically**. It’s not something everyone does, so you have to keep closing brackets somewhere close, but having them next to each other like in Atreus is not a very smart move.

And there are many more, these are just the ones that popped into my head.

Well, they advertise it as a “hackable” keyboard, but honestly every keyboard is hackable because you can always create your own layout. And yeah, it looks like you can accomplish the same thing (their layered thing) with a nice xkb layout on any keyboard.

In fact, any keyboard can be configured like atreus because basically any keyboard has 4 rows if you count the number row. The form factor may not be as nice, but on laptop keyboards that is definitely a valuable option. This way you get Atreus-like thingy with a bunch of extra thumb keys – nice! That’s something that I have considered during design of my layout. Also, on japanese keyboards you can shift your right hand 1 key to the right and this way you earn a whole column of keys for index fingers – awesome (something that you wont get on atreus, ugh). Still not sure if I should do that on my layout though (as I hope that one day they will start producing non-japanese keyboards without retardedly huge spacebar).

I hope that this comment is not very anti-Atreus-ish, it is still a great piece of hardware. But er, that’s kinda what you get when you start creating a keyboard just because you can, not because you have a good understanding of the issue. Among other keyboards atreus is kinda cheap, which is great! But if you want a proper physical layout, then take a look at Ergodox. That’s the only keyboard that does almost everything right.

Ergodox

– AlexDaniel 2016-03-28 02:58 UTC

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I totally understand the part about shift, fn, and possibly other modifiers like AltGr. I think the Atreus default is made for an English audience. Where am I going to find all the characters for the languages I speak, like äëïöüáéíóúàèìòùãõç? But before I start getting into that, I think I need to do some other stuff, first: I need to switch this Windows machine to a US keyboard layout and learn how to code in Eclipse because this my Use Case. I won’t be using this keyboard at home, for the moment.

Should I use it at home, there’s the entire situation with Apple’s use of the option key.

use of the option key

– Alex Schroeder 2016-03-29 07:00 UTC