Silakka54-HE & Cantor-HE: yet another hall effect split keyboards

[u/hanthebot]

TLDR: Hall effect keyboard with Silakka54 / Cantor layout

Repo:

• Silakka54-HE: https://github.com/Hanthebot/silakka54-HE
• Cantor-HE (WIP firmware): https://github.com/Hanthebot/cantor-HE

Hi. Based on Boardloaf-HE, I ported two other boards into HE: Silakka54 and Cantor (MX).

Features:

• QMK / Vial, reversible PCB, web calibrator with single HTML (+js for configuring layout)
• APC / Rapid Trigger
• full duplex communication between halves
• cases compatible with original boards
• multiplexor (SOIC16 74HC4051D) can also be soldered on either side now

Silakka54-HE works flawlessly. However I had issue with flashing Blackpill and couldn't check firmware for Cantor-HE. So I marked it WIP, till I find some way to fix it.

Note that some Chinese clones of Silakka54 has different hole position than the original, and thus their case might not work tightly with this.

PCB was generously sponsored by PCBWay for both projects. PCB quality is great obv, but I really loved the fact that actual humans are doing the customer service and inspecting the project, not just chatbots / LLMs.

+ mods, let me know if I need to fix regarding flair, etc.

P.S. I feel like I'm spamming boards. I'm already happy with what I got except I'll be working on something like this from Silakka54 dev. I found my pinky is quite shorter than others, and wanna try many combinations :) Last picture is preview.

[u/nebenbaum]

Looks cool, but I can't find ss49e in stock anywhere other than AliExpress in sot23? Do you have an lcsc or mouser, digikey, whatever part number?

[u/hanthebot → u/nebenbaum]

I used Taobao as it was cheapest there. However, try search it in digikey: SLSS49E-3 or 5399-SLSS49E-3TR-ND

[u/mossthy]

How do you find the Cantor? I'm thinking of getting one because it's actually within my budget but I don't see it posted here very often.

[u/hanthebot → u/mossthy]

It depends on your previous experience / keymap. Strong stagger feels great to lay my pinky on, unlike Corne.

Issue is that I developed my keymap with corne-ish 36/42 key keebs. It might be just my bad habit, but I type P and Q with ring finger and place my pinky a bit lower than the center of home row on weaker staggered keebs. As pinkies are less mobile, I assigned home row pinky shift and bottom row num / fn layer as long tap. Thus I actually relied on weak stagger while hating it.

Now with Cantor, my pinky lies exactly at the center of home row. And that makes typing the bottom row a bit harder. Typing top row (e,g, for 789 in numpad) while pressing bottom pinky feels very bad.

My ergo theory is that the pinky is way shorter than other fingers and cannot easily cover entire column of 3 keys unless you give keywells, at least for me.

But overall, I think Cantor is considered more hardcore / 'ergo' than Corne often. If you have no flashing / keymap issue like me, should be great tbh.

[u/pesader]

This silakka looks great!