Instead of a big battery, get Qi charging coils and a large charging mat. Now your keyboard is constantly charged when on your desk.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Or get a 3rd MCU to use as a dongle so that acts as the more power hungry central board. Even with tiny 110mAh batteries, that'll give you 3 months of battery life with a pair of nice!nano2s.
You mean using RF instead of Bluetooth?
No, you can setup a dongle with bluetooth. In a regular zmk setup with nice!nanos or whatever bluetooth MCU, the two halves communicate wirelessly over bluetooth, a central one that does all the calculating of what key presses to actually send, and a peripheral that just sends raw keystrokes to the central one. But with a dongle setup, you'd get a 3rd MCU that you plug into the computer that acts as a central board without any keys that has 2 peripheral boards it communicates with. Because you'll keep that 3rd MCU plugged into the computer, it won't need its own battery or even any components, it can just be a bare MCU. You could also make a case for it if you wanted:
That sounds interesting but im also planning on taking this to school so a big ish battery is nice to have but i havent heard of that and that seems like a cool thing to have but can i put that mat under my deskmat and it still charge?
As long as it’s properly aligned it should work through a mat, it works through phone cases. Even thick ones.
Edit: Just found this amazing item on AliExpress. Check it out! $1.03 25％ Off | Support Micro USB Type C Qi Wireless Charger Adapter Induction Receiver Coil Pad https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMv9ZMm
yea i could see if i can get another one that so i can build in the coil
how the hell would i connect that coil tho
Two small (110mah) batteries in my sweep last me more than a week and charge in less than an hour. I think you might be overestimating how much battery power you need.
There are a couple 3d printed corne cases that allow for large batteries though:
I’ve got a 5x3 Aurora Corne, plate case, large stand-offs so I can fit 1500mAh batteries under the board. Makes it a bit “high” profile, so to speak, but I’m okay with it.
Are you putting backlighting in your build? If so, that’ll be the biggest power drain. I built my board with backlighting, although I’ve never use it. Even so I get about a week out of the right side and a few days out of the left. Planning to pull the LEDs out at some point in favour of better battery life.
Depending on the case you pick you should be able to find one with enough space in the base for decent sized batteries. I was looking at some Scottokeebs cases at one point (https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1452267605/corne-keyboard-3x6-3d-printed-case-wired); one reason I didn’t go for in in the end was because the cutouts weren’t in the right places for the Aurora PCBs controls— mainly the power switch. Give some thought to what you actually need to access with respect to any case you get.
Apologies if any of this is obvious!
yea ive got an solutions someone offerd to redesign the mitosis keyboard into the corne layout with a bigger battery (it has like 2 years battery life on one of those small thin ones)