kymecreo

The idea, finally: combine the deep nerdosphere of ergonomic split mechanical keyboards with expressive MIDI control. The problem was always that switches only output a boolean — on or off. Music is dynamic; velocity is everything. Then I found analog switches.

How they work: a magnet in the switch stem moves toward a hall-effect sensor as you press. The sensor reads how far down the key is — an analog range, not a 1 or a 0 — which becomes velocity. Wired one Lekker switch over a sensor into an Arduino Nano and the serial plotter drew a beautiful curve, picking up the slightest movement. Proof of concept. Ordered a big perfboard.

Night one: soldered the hall sensors in an ergonomic layout I designed by putting my hand on the board and marking where my fingers naturally landed. Night two: six hours soldering everything — headers, sockets, power and ground per sensor, and a joystick as an XY thumb mod-wheel (which needed its own tiny sub-board so power and ground wouldn't short on one trace). "This is my first successful soldering project, I am still in disbelief that I got it running in one night."

Flashed it, held my breath, plugged in the Teensy. It worked. Fun bug: the key sitting under a 5V trace read high by default — the switch was acting as a tiny electromagnet. Velocity and aftertouch (squish a fully-pressed key into a silicone O-ring) both came through. Analog mechanical-switch MIDI controllers work.

Started the enclosure. Printed the open-source Skeletyl ergo-split, cut off the thumb cluster, then sculpted Sculpey clay around it to hold the joystick and find a shape my hand liked. 3D-scanned the clay with an iPad, then re-modeled it from scratch in Fusion 360 using the scan as reference and cutting switch holes from an array of negatives.

Open threads: proper velocity resolution (right now it's basically two values, med and high) and polyphonic aftertouch; octave control beyond the current twelve notes; a left-hand companion controller for note range, timbral CC, and looper control; a real PCB; MPE; and, eventually, a better name than kymecreo.