the find
− 0.6 mA workbench for eight community-designed split keyboards, drawn from the designers' published files: Cygnus 3x5, Charybdis Nano, Dilemma MAX, moNa2, TOTEM SHIFT, Corne 3x5 in MX and Choc, and W-Corne v4.1 — 35 to 56 keys each. Every part is real geometry from the designers' own files: case top and bottom, plate, PCB, switches, caps, screws, feet, trackball, the controller and its labels.
The case comes in anodised, powder-coated, brass, copper, silver, steel, titanium or 24k gold — sandblasted, brushed or polished, with an optional patina — or in walnut, teak, cherry, maple, oak, sandalwood or rosewood, or in clear, frosted or opaque plastic. Caps in ABS, PBT, clear or frosted, sixteen colourways, legends in English, Thai or Japanese, per-key RGB with a travelling wave. The picker is a gallery of blueprints: every board drawn as a technical drawing — plan view, hidden switch cutouts, front elevation, dimensions — generated from the models themselves.
One link holds the whole build: board, materials, caps, light, camera, and even the seed of the wood grain.
cross-section
− 1.3 mBehind the page sits a folder of Python generators that read the upstream CAD — STEP, KiCad boards, STL — and emit every part in the viewer's frame, with tables for switch positions, screws, feet, port openings and controller labels. Heavy parts the eye never sees are decimated in Blender for the web copy only.
In the browser it is three.js: physically based metals with iridescence and transmission, procedural wood shaders, legends as projected decals drawn on a canvas, a studio of softboxes and a rim light, and a ground-truth ambient-occlusion pass at half resolution that darkens key gaps and switch wells. Machined edges are found by a worker thread that walks each case's free edges and skips every edge that meets another part, so seams stay sharp and only exposed edges take the cut. Models load per board, on demand: about 2 MB for the lightest, about 30 MB for the heaviest.
Titanium got its own patina: the heat-tint oxide films of the real metal — straw, gold, bronze, purple, royal blue, sky blue.
[the boards are their designers' work, credited inside the configurator · the viewer, materials and pipeline are original]
inscription
− 2.0 mField note, from the commit log, 2026-10-25: A refactor left a comment marker in the middle of a line in the edge worker. It silenced exactly the half of the test that picks the neighbouring face's corner, so the convex-edge check began measuring a corner on the edge itself — and dropping the edge. About two thirds of the machined chamfers vanished from every board. Nothing errored; the keyboards just looked slightly softer than they should. The fix was one line. The lesson was a check that the viewer's chamfer list must match the models' free edges, every build.
The same week, a TRRS jack sat 1.1 mm low and 0.7 mm to the side of its hole — exactly where the jack lives on the circuit board, not where the case designer cut for it. A script now measures every round opening in a case wall and centres the part on the hole.