The Better-Geometry Release
Keyboards with vertical thumb clusters! Plus consistently thick parts when staggering keys to fit your hand and stable STEP export.
Cosmos Blog
Better than CAD Part 1: Thickening Webs
If you followed the last blog post on offset surfaces, you’ll know improving part thickness has been a long-time goal of Cosmos. Many times, the naive approach of lofting the sides of key sockets creates solids too thin to print. This is a problem for both keyboards exported from Cosmos and keyboards built with CAD tools. Let’s discover how the generator fixes these issues!
Offset Surfaces: The Panacea for Bad Geometry?
Tools like Cosmos are huge time-savers in that they can take a simple design (such as the choice of where each key goes) and generate something much more complex. But once you give the task of designing to the computer, you better be sure the computer does a good job.
Which brings me to the subject of surface offsetting…
Open Sourcing Cosmos
The Cosmos Keyboard Generator is now Open Source on GitHub!
It’s 2023, and you can scan your hand, 3d-print a keyboard designed to fit it, send the electronics to be fabricated, and then plug your new keyboard into your computer and start typing.
Pretty crazy huh? And I bet we’ll be living in a whole different world next decade.
All this is built on the hard work of many, many people that’s been open-sourced: From open-source-hardware 3D printers to projects like KiCad and the Dactyl keyboard, open codebases have created a thriving community of forks & contributors, and they have helped bring cutting-edge technology to so many people. So now I’m excited to announce that the Cosmos Generator is open-source as well.