Joe Scotto's ScottoChoczard Is a Fully-Wireless 3D-Printable Evolution of the ScottoHazard Keyboard
True wireless, with a dedicated microcontroller and battery in each half, this ortholinear keyboard is ready to 3D print now.
Maker and custom keyboard enthusiast Joe Scotto has released another of his open hardware keyboard designs, the ScottoChoczard — a hand-wired split ortholinear layout designed as a successor to his earlier ScottoHazard.
"About three months ago I built the ScottoHazard which was my first 'real' split keyboard," Scotto explains of his latest creation. "I have enjoyed it so much that I wanted to see what I could do to improve the design and the result is the ScottoChoczard."
The ScottoChoczard is visibly an twist on the earlier ScottoHazard, though larger: the twin 4×5 40-keys layout has been expanded to twin 4×6 for a total of 48 keys, all identically-sized and laid out in a gridded ortholinear fashion with no rake in the columns. The switches are lightweight-actuation Kailh Choc Pink mechanical switches with Scotto's custom-designed 3D-printed ScottoCaps Scooped keycaps on top.
The biggest change over the ScottoHazard, though, is that the ScottoChoczard is fully wireless. Both halves of the keyboard are driven by a Nice! Keyboards nice!nano, a compact microcontroller board designed to be pin-compatible with the Arduino Pro Micro, with a 750mAh battery for power — "which," Scotto says, "will give it about two months [of use] on a single charge."
This is far from Scotto's first keyboard design: discounting the aforementioned ScottoHazard, he's built the ultra-thin ScottoWing, a one-handed input device inspired by the Frogpad, the unusual-layout ScottoKatana, and the ScottoDeck, and the ergonomic Bluetooth-connected Scotto63 — though his most recent, the Scotto69 "Nice Edition," stands out as being the only one to feature a custom PCB rather than having its components hand-wired inside the 3D-printed case.
More information on the keyboard is available on Scotto's website and Reddit post, while the design files and firmware are available on GitHub under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license as his previous builds.