It would seem it's a large quantity of work for what is essentially an "imperfect" keyboard by typical standards. I actually found I really liked the layout when I used it exclusively. It had the benefit of more vertical movements and less diagonal transition movements with my hands while typing.
Unfortunately it's just off enough (and I don't have multiple Atomic keyboard) so whenever I would go from work to home I would have a period of adjustment. It drove me nuts. I loved the layout, and have great keycaps on the keyswitches, but it's just not worth the period of relearning every single day.
Also, when going from a fixed keyboard, such as a laptop, back to the ortholinear it would take the same amount of adjustment. I'm really talking about 30 seconds or so, but it's enough that the mental adjustment was frustrating.
The Neutrino, by contrast, is normally a hand wired standard offset keyboard. Assembled it would, presumably, have no real adjustment time since it would be the same offset as any other qwerty keyboard one uses daily. This seemed like the perfect design for me. I have built several keyboards, and they all aren't quite the layout I want. The Neutrino is nearly exactly the layout I would design if I was doing it from the start. I started out and bought a kit (top and bottom plates plus a middle divider made from acrylic.)
The work I did on the atomic keyboard gave me experience when it comes to how keyboards really work. I decided I was going to try and make my life easier.
For some idea of what it takes, a member of the mechanicalkeyboards subreddit livestreamed soldering a planck keyboard (which is ~20% less complicated than an Atomic.) It took him more than 6 hours to complete from start to finish.
Since the process of hand wiring a keyboard is so incredibly time intensive, I had decided I was going to try and make the process easier. Having also built a phantom, and an infinity v60 keyboard I knew how beneficial using a PCB was to creating a keyboard from scratch.
It is so much easier to solder points to a PCB (through hole points) than it is to solder individual wires and diodes to each other by hand. With a little research I found the "enabler" pcbs. They are small printed circuit boards that allow for through hole mounting of switches, diodes and leds to. The caveat being, instead of an integrated circuit board where all switches go into one large board, they are individual PCBs that you have to crosswire between each other.
The image to the right has a few of the PCBs by themselves, and a row of switches soldered to a Neutrino. At first glance it definitely looks like it will allow an intrepid keyboard creator the ability to make a much cleaner keyboard design. But that's at first glance.
To give some more clarity let me break down the process for a hand wired board:
Step 1: Insert switches into plate
Step 2: Solder a Diode to one side of the key switch
Step 3: Solder the end of the diode to the next diode (off of the next switch.)
Step 4: Solder the other terminal on the switch to a wire that is connecting vertically to the switch above & below it.
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Per switch, you are basically only soldering three times. For a keyboard composed of roughly 70 keys, you are soldering 210 times. It actually goes pretty quickly and you can make it look relatively decent after a little practice.
You can see in the image above, the grid layout sort of forms itself with a bit of practice. While still rudimentary, it can be somewhat orderly.
Unfortunately, the enabler requires 6 solder points per keyswitch (up to 9 if you're using LEDs,) I hadn't realized this before I started building the keyboard and so I didn't have solid core wire and appropriate gear to strip and solder so many cables.
I will continue to make it work, but at this point the enabler seems like a giant time sink, and I'm seriously regretting not just wiring the keyboard by hand.
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