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About the SoleilThe Soleil is a solar powered wireless TKL keyboard. Inspired by the solar powered nature of trees and plants, beautiful wooden accents are integrated into the design.
This keyboard started as an idea from
Gondolindrim. He came to me with an idea to make a solar powered wireless keyboard, so that the keyboard would charge itself, thus needing external charging seldomly, if at all. He had already picked a TKL layout, done calculations to make sure a solar panel over the arrow cluster could sustain battery usage in sunlight, and had basically done all the hard work to ensure that this idea was worth pursuing.
With a layout and PCB in hand, I asked
James (of AKB fame) to take a stab at making a case for this PCB. We decided together that due to the solar-environmental motivation of the project, wood needed to be integrated into this board, and James did the hard work of actually designing something that works well with the looser tolerances of wood.
The end result is
Soleil - an absolutely stunning mixed-material wireless keyboard that can fully self-sustain with just the power of light.
Solar Caveats
The math and real world testing has shown that under average office lighting, the keyboard is just shy of full autonomy. This means that under the average office lighting, you probably will need to charge this keyboard at some point.
However, ambient light conditions will vary greatly. Homes have less light than offices, which have less light than outdoors. If your office happens to get a lot of sun, there’s a chance the keyboard will self sustain! But even if the charge from your ambient conditions can’t sustain usage entirely, the solar charger will still extend the battery life of the Soleil.
The Soleil has a 780 mAh battery and uses ZMK (and supports ZMK Studio). Given how Gondo designed the PCB to be power efficient, and the efficiencies driven by ZMK itself, the battery should last 10 months (usage dependent), without any solar power. With that in mind, even with a trickle of solar power, those 10 months should easily be extended to a year or even more.
Additionally, because the Soleil is designed to be solar powered, it requires a battery to be installed. This is different from most ZMK-powered boards, which will work just fine without a battery as long as they’re plugged in via USB. This is due to the solar harvesting system, which requires a battery to be plugged in at all times.
While it would run counter to the purpose of this keyboard, if IC results show that people want to use this without a battery, we can provide a wired PCB option.
Wood Caveats
Wood is a natural material that expands and contracts with humidity, temperature, and a bunch of other factors. The wood parts may not be perfectly flush with some of the other metal parts depending on current conditions. With that in mind, the keyboard is designed to work around this. The variance in wooden parts will not impact the usability or feel of the board. But if you’re expecting wood parts to be perfectly flush to the 0.1mm, you’re in for a bad time. That said, we do expect the wooden parts to have a good finish, without any deep scratches, chips, or gouges.
An example of the fitment variances expected with wooden partsWhy didn’t we use stabilized wood? The whole idea of this board is to lean into nature. Every single wood piece is going to be different, and we wanted to keep more of a natural finish on the wood as well. Stabilizing wood also adds to costs, and we want to keep this reasonably priced. To us, it’s acceptable to lean into and embrace the natural properties of the material and design around it, versus trying to fight against it.
