HE75

HE75

A standard 60% kebyoard (GH60 compatible) with 75 hall effects keys and an ortholinear layout.

Prior Art

While this keyboard is my own design, I pulled from many prior keyboard designs to figure out 60% layouts and how to layout hall effect sensors.

• MoonBoard, which I used heavily for routing patterns, schematic design, and even to find code to program QMK.
• Void Switch 65% (and the 2 begining videos part 1 and part 2), for giving me a starting point.
• HE8 (and his writeup) to confirm components work.

I also used a few community assets to start the design:

• https://github.com/ebastler/marbastlib for switches and stabalizers footprints.
• https://github.com/ai03-2725/JP60 for an up-to-date GH60 shell layout.

Constraints while designing

1. Must fit into a 60% keyboard case
2. Must use an ortholinear layout
3. Must use hall effect keys

I bought a Wooting 60HE module and case, but I just can't stand the standard keyboard layout after using a split-ortho board for years. This is my attempt to cram an ortholinear layout into the same case, keeping it as close to a normal row staggered layout as possible. I do need occasional 1-handed access to right-hand side of the keyboard, I'm not after a mock split.

The first major issue is mouting positions for GH60 keyboards (marked in red):

When putting an ortholinear layout over top of that, several of the keys conflict:

If I were using standard MX key switches, this would only require rotating those keys 90% and skipping the screws in those locations. But with a hall effect keyboard, there's a hall effect sensor on the backside of the PCB occupying the same space as the screw mount. I need to move it so that it doesn't short out or get damaged when inserting the keyboard into the case. So for three keys (Q, H, and ), the sensor is roughly 1mm out of alignment with the key switch's magnet. Hopefully this'll be ok.

Next Steps

I haven't ordered the first set of boards yet. JLCPCB estimates $47 for the first 5 PCBs, and $142 to get them assembled. I'm hoping someone will review the design before I send it off, I'm very new to this.