I built a wireless split keyboard

I’ve been using wired compact split keyboards for a year now on my workstation. It’s great with my laptops, but there are a few things on my feature wishlist. I wanted to have:

• Swap between 4 devices (2 laptops, tablet, mobile).
• Sit on the couch while working.
• Write notes on my tablet anywhere in the house.

While I could have went with a pre-built keyboard, I didn’t want to compromise on having my custom compact split layout. I’ve decided that the answer to this list is to build a wireless, portable version of my main keyboard.

I’ve been working on a keymapping that allows me to have all keys of a full-sized keyboard in just 36 keys. There’s a lot to talk about here and I’d love to write about it in a future post, but here’s the basics:

My favourite way of using the keyboard is in what I’d call semi-wireless mode, with the left half being wired to the laptop, and the right half being wireless.

This allows me to overcome Bluetooth flakiness and latency. Connection between the two halves is very consistent and reliable, while some laptops and tablets can sometimes be a hit-or-miss (more on this later).

Most keyboards are built using QMK firmware, but I chose to use the ZMK firmware for my keyboard. ZMK supports wireless keyboards, while QMK doesn’t.

I had to port over my QMK keymap to ZMK by hand. I personally found ZMK quite easy to get started with, and didn’t have too much trouble with it.

Latency and reliability often depends per device. Here’s what I’ve been using it on:

Connection between both halves of the split keyboard is very solid. Here’s how it works:

ZMK keyboards can pair with multiple devices using profiles. Here’s what I’ve observed so far on how ZMK handles profiles:

Debouncing is a feature of keyboards used to prevent double-presses common with imperfect soldering. Both ZMK (v2.5 on Nov 2021) and QMK have debouncing off by default, which adds a latency of 5ms per keypress.

I found that it’s best to turn this feature on. ZMK also supports eager-debouncing which minimises the latency down to 1ms.

# Debounce settings
# https://zmk.dev/docs/features/debouncing
CONFIG_ZMK_KSCAN_DEBOUNCE_PRESS_MS=1
CONFIG_ZMK_KSCAN_DEBOUNCE_RELEASE_MS=5

There is an undocumented option to enable sleep mode called CONFIG_ZMK_SLEEP. This will turn off the device after not being used for a period of time. Caveat: it will take around 5 seconds to reconnect after waking up.

• To wake up — press any key on the left half to wake up the board. This will make the board try to reconnect to the laptop via Bluetooth.
• Use the left half to wake up — Since the primary half is the left, pressing a key on the right half will not reconnect the keyboard to the computer.

In the end, I turned off sleep mode. 5 seconds to wake up was too long. Since I use the keyboard semi-wirelessly around 75% of the time, I never need to worry about charging.

CONFIG_ZMK_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_ZMK_IDLE_SLEEP_TIMEOUT=2700000
# 2700000 = 45mins
# 3600000 = 1hr

I used a 110mAh battery, which is the smallest battery you can get away with on the nice!nano. I’ve heard from others making builds with up to 3,000mAh, but given I was using this wired from time to time, I’m happy with a small battery.

I initially thought of adding an on/off power switch, but I opted to solder the battery directly to the keyboard.

There are two reasons I thought I’d need a physical switch for: to save battery life, and to prevent keypresses when the keyboard is stored away. ZMK’s sleep functionality can take care of the first, while a lock layer can take care of the second.

This means there’s no way to turn the keyboard completely off, and I found that it’s okay. Our phones work the same way afterall!

Getting the battery percentage is tricky without an OLED screen. The battery meter for the left half is reported on these platforms over Bluetooth:

I’ve found that is not reported on these platforms:

I ended up having to buy another pair of nice!nano v2 micro-controllers. I encountered some issues with the original ones I had:

• The left one just died. It was getting warm to touch when I plug it in, which might suggest there’s a short caused by some bad soldering.

• The right one didn’t hold a charge. WHen I tested it with a multimeter, I found that there’s less resistance between the battery terminals compared to a healthy unit. I think this implies that there is a very slight short somewhere.

There is a hardware reset button on my build. I’d press this once to reboot the firmware, or twice to enter bootloader mode to allow reflashing.

This might be specific to my build, but I find that sometimes I need to press the hardware reset button after leaving the keyboard alone for a while. Not sure if this is because the firmware crashed, or I have some shoddy soldering somewhere.

Some more random bullet points:

• There’s no low power notification. I was surprised once when the right half stopped working, only to find out that it ran out of power.

• I was wondering if I can take this in airplanes, given it’s always-on. I learned that the FAA page literally says “You can also continue to use short-range Bluetooth accessories, like wireless keyboards” (link).

• One inconvenient way to get the right-hand side battery percentage is by using a multimeter. Measuring the voltage between the B- and B+ pins gets the approximate battery power left. In my set up, 4.2V is full.