When I got my MiniVan, my colleagues thought I was nuts. How could I possibly type on something so small as a 40% keyboard. Well I managed. So that can only mean I’m ready for the next level of crazy. This is:

The 30% Gherkin Keyboard

The first time I saw the Gherkin at 40% club, I thought ‘Holyyy shit, that thing is adorable’. It essentially made the perfect meme board that, with some ingenuity, would still be usable. So I bought a black PCB from a Group Buy, the case from Smashing Acrylics, Pro Micro, switches, WS2812b underglow LED strips, PVC wires of 3 different colours, diodes and got to work.

Have to admit, due to inexperience, this is one my hardest build to date. Let’s see how I messed up in the

Build Log

Bent and soldered the diodes in. Flush cut the pins.

2. Put the switches in the plate. Switches are 67g Zealios. There was an extra step I took, but its optional and arguably not recommended.

You can see that the 3mm thicc acrylic plate meant that the switches did not clip in. The switch pins just about made it to the other side to be soldered on. I actually also bought some holtites to make the switches hot-swappable, this was the optional step.

2.5. I inserted the holtites into the switch pins first, then put the switches into the plate. I could not have soldered or tacked the holtites onto the PCB directly because as previously stated, the switch pins didn’t reach all the way through.

The method I used, however, was unwise as it made it easier for solder to flow through the gaps of the holtites and touch the pins, essentially sticking them together. I should have just not used holtites. I may still make an attempt to salvage their usage, discussed in my Evaluation Section.

3. I trimmed the Pro Micro header pins on the longer end so they’re about 3mm shorter. The reason for this is 'case' specific. The Smashing Acrylic case has a 9.5mm clearing. Without trimming, the Pro Micro would not sit comfortably inside the case as the header pins are around 12mm in length. Trimming it by 3mm allowed it to fit into the case more comfortably. I could have trimmed more, but because I have a cheapo soldering iron with only 1 type of tip, trimming more would have made it more difficult to solder the headers onto the PCB.

4. Soldered the Pro Micro onto the PCB. At this point, the Gherkin essentially ‘worked’.

5. The acrylic diffuser layer of the case is perfect for underglow. I prepped my LED strips, using 16 LEDs. I used Red wires for VCC, White wires for Data and Black wires for GND. I mainly followed this guide for the Let’s Split but with adjustments. So, as instructed, I cut the LED strips to the lengths I needed, at the middle of their solder pads. I cut the wires to the approppriate lengths as well.

6. I filled the LED pads with solder first, which made soldering the wire to them easier. I then trimmed the end of each wire and soldered them onto the pads. The direction should go DIN -> DOUT, so the above image shows the wires going from Pro Micro into the LED strips.

7. Soldered the wires to their appropriate pins. White to TX0, Red to VCC and Black to GND. The Gherkin actually have breakout pads which I could have through-hole soldered the wires into and made it easier for myself. However, I wanted to save these pads for potential future usage. Besides, I found soldering the wire onto the Pro Micro pins to be easy enough anyway.

8. Placed the LED strips onto the bottom side of the case, rather than on the bottom side of the PCB as per popular procedure. There were several reasons I did this:

Surface of case is flatter, making it easier to stick the strips down.

Zealio switch housing is transparent, I hoped the light direction facing the switches would allow it to diffuse some light as well.

Possible future attempt to seperate switches from holtites would be easier as I don’t have to remove the strips from the PCB.

The only downside of this is whenever I wish to take the board apart, the top side and bottom side of the case are essentially stuck together by the LED strips, which doesn’t bother me too much as I didn’t want to have to take it apart that often anyway.

The placement of the LED strips in the picture above is not the final placement, but I did not make the right side symetrical to the left as doing so would mean there isn’t enough clearing for the Pro Micro. My final placement would likely just extend the longer strips in both directions, but that is future work.

Bonus Pic, very unprofessional looking soldering job 😝

9. Closed the case, caps on, programmed the board and Voila!

Typing Demonstration

Some glowing as well 😄.

Opinions

After a week or so of usage, I think the Gherkin hits a lot of sweet spot for me.

Small Travel Board

Its compact and fits in a single compartment in my bag. I took it to a few lectures and it sat nicely on the somewhat small desk there as well. I paired it up with my phone to take notes (rather slowly as I’m not use to the layout or ortholinear yet 😜). I may be bold enough to take it into meetings in the future as well, when I start work 😛.

Reasonably nice thocc

Props to Edd at Smashing Acrylics, the thicc acrylic case/plate is the reason for the rather nice thock sound. PBT caps also contributed and I enjoy the light thock sound a lot.

Usability

I know a lot of people in the community might see the Gherkin as a meme board but I’m very adamanat that it is suitable for some usage 😃. Since it is programmable via QMK, having multiple layers containing different sets of characters makes the Gherkin viable. I have the alphas, as in the pictures, on layer 0, numbers on layer 1, pretty much all other punctuation related characters on layer 2 and RGB-related stuff on layer 3. I also used a lot of Mod Tap (code MT) to allow for Backspace, Shift, Ctrl to be on layer 0.



I’m currently not sure if I would reach the same level of productivty as I would on a 40% keyboard, even when I am more familar to the Gherkin layout. Technically, the number of keys I have to press in order to reach punctuation and numbers are the same on both my MiniVan and my Gherkin. Modifiers are also not an issue thanks to Mod Tap. I’m just not used to it enough yet to tell.

Currently, I mainly use the Gherkin for gaming 😛. Perfect amount of keys, nice underglow to look at whilst resting my eyes.

Beautiful

Edd’s case and underglow is just simply made for each other, its beautiful to look at.

Evaluation

Lots of fuck ups so this might be a bit long, please feel free to ignore.

Firstly, holtites. For this build, I was probably better off if I just didn’t use the holtites. There was no easy way to get the holtites to be tacked on. In hindsight, I still think that my method was the most likely to work and even then it didn’t work so well.

I might try to de-attach the holtites and switches by applying some heat to the switches and pulling them out without pulling the holtites.

Second, the Pro Micro. I actually messed up very bad. Initially I did not trim the Pro Micro header pins, so it did not fit in the case comfortably (the case would have had gaps between the layers).

Un-trimmed header, the Pro Micro sits very high and the case won’t close without gaps

Trimming also meant its easier to solder it straight. You can see that its slightly slanted in the above picture due to longer header pins. So I had to desolder my first attempt.

For some reason, I have never managed to desolder Pro Micros. Maybe its due to my cheapo soldering iron not reaching a high enough temperature to melt the solder that is attached to the header. I had to use a flush cutter to cut the pins and rip the controller off 😝, only then was I able to melt the remaining solder and take the pieces out.

Good lord …

This method of desoldering was not ideal as even though it did work, you can see that some of my pads were partially damaged in the process.

If I was to re-do the build, I would have socketed my Pro Micro rather than solder it straight on, I got impatient and decided not to do it, even the second time round 😝. I thought this wasn’t necessary as I would never have to replace the controller. But I have now learnt that the controller could fail and I could make big mistakes like this one, so socketing as much as possible from now on 😝. Additionally, new controllers with cool useful functionalities, like the BlueMicro, makes socketing controllers suddenly very desireable, although with underglow there may need to be more logistics in planning due to potentially different voltages.

Overall I’m still happy enough with my build despite these mistakes. I can just treat the build as if I didn’t use holtites. I don’t think I’d use a different switch on this board anyway. I guess I can always just pluck off the Pro Micro again for a socketed build … but at the moment it doesn’t feel necessary.