Building My First Split Keyboard: The Corne (CRKBD)
Simon Maddison / November 2025 (501 Words, 3 Minutes)
Table of contents
Overview
A couple of years ago I decided to dip my toes into mechanical keyboards. My first board was the X-Bows Nature — a cross-linear ergonomic keyboard with pretty wooden accents. I used it every day for over a year, but I could never get comfortable with the ever-widening rows and extreme radial stagger. The one thing it did succeed at was making me fall in love with ortholinear layouts and proper mechanical switches.
That’s when I discovered the Corne keyboard (aka crkbd), a gorgeous 42-key split designed by foostan. The columnar stagger, aggressive pinky curve, and three thumb keys per half were exactly what I’d been looking for. Being both cheap and an engineer, buying a pre-built was never an option — I grabbed a full DIY kit from Custom KBD here in Australia and had an absolute blast soldering it together.
The Build
The Custom KBD kit includes the PCBs, hot-swap sockets, diodes, TRRS jacks, reset switches, screws/standoffs, bottom plates, underglow LEDs, and even a TRRS cable — everything except controllers, switches, keycaps and a USB-C cable.
I sourced separately:
- 2 × nice!nano v2 (wireless) or Pro Micro / RP2040-Zero (wired)
- 42 × MX switches (tried heaps — current ones are gloriously clicky, model long forgotten)
- 1 × USB-C cable
- Keycaps — Ducky PBT Dye-Sub 132-Key MDA Profile “Dino” set
Assembly is dead easy if you follow the official v3 Corne Cherry build guide.
Took me 4–5 hours across two evenings, and the hot-swap sockets mean I can still swap switches whenever the mood strikes.
Mods
Two tiny, cheap upgrades made it perfect:
-
Tenting
M3 bolts of varying lengths + nuts → solid, adjustable ~20° tent for almost nothing. -
Case
Low-profile “Corne LP” by tominabox1, printed in black resin at PCBWay. Looks stealthy and still lets a little underglow escape around the edges.
Firmware & Keymap
I’ve run both QMK (wired) and ZMK (wireless nice!nano) on this board. Both started as the stock crkbd layout and have been heavily tweaked since.
Repos are public — steal anything you like:
Final Thoughts
This Corne has been my daily driver for over 12 months. I have zero intention of ever going back to a normal keyboard.
If you’re on the fence about building a split ortho — just do it. Soldering is nowhere near as scary as it looks, the community is ridiculously helpful, and the end result feels like it was custom-made for your hands.
Building the Corne kit also got me itching to design my own from scratch. The first step on that road is Mad_RP2040 — a small RP2040 test board that’s slowly turned into a full 4×4 keypad while I sort out the controller block for the eventual split.
P.S. If you’re in Australia and staring at parts lists wondering where to start, feel free to ping me (GitHub issues, X DMs, whatever). Happy to help with recommendations, soldering advice, or just give you the final nudge.
Happy Clacking!
Build Images
