Ergogen V4 Migration Guide

What's this "Ergogen"?

Ergogen is a great tool for building and designing your own keyboard. The best introductory videos to know my knowledge are this video by Ben Vallack and this talk by the creator himself.

Sadly, they are for version 3, and that's where this document comes in.

Oh and be sure to check out the Discord, lots of helpful people there.

What's this so-called "Guide"?

Ergogen recently went from v3 to v4, but sadly the creator didn't find the time to update the docs yet. To ease the transition, I started collecting the necessary steps to transform your v3 configuration into a working v4 one!

However, this will not tell you about what v4 improved and can do now. Sadly I don't have neither the time nor the insight (or the time to gain that insight) about v4 to produce a real guide, you will have to wait until the updated docs for that.

TOC

• Necessary Steps
• Example
  • Units
  • Points
  • Outlines
  • PCBs
  • Cases
• Other Examples & Thanks
• Difference between Splay and Rotate

Necessary Steps

• points:
  • nest stagger and origin in key field
  • nest rotate in key field and rename to splay (unless you really want rotate, see Difference between Splay and Rotate for difference, spoiler: you don't want rotate anymore)
  • footprints need to be moved to pcbs. Also add where: true to apply them to all points
  • row_overrides has been superseded by $unset: columns.col_x.row_overrides.row_y: turns into columns.col_x.rows.row_y: $unset (a lot of people use $skip: true instead of $unset which works similarily)
  • anchors with multiple refs, e.g. anchor: [ref1, ref2] need to be transformed into anchor.aggregate.parts: [ref1, ref2]. In the future, the aggregation method can be modified using anchor.aggregate.method, but default and old (and only) behavior is average
• outlines:
  • glue has been removed! I never worked with glue, so I'm not the best to tell you how to replace it, my guess would be to use a polygon. If you find a good and reliable solution, you know where to find me
  • remove exports nesting
  • rename type to what
  • rename anchor to adjust
  • switch type: keys to what: rectangle and add where: true
  • rectangles now have their origin centered instead of in the bottom left corner, so for the old behaviour you need to shift them by [width/2, height/2]
• pcbs:
  • rename class to designator
  • rename type to what
  • rename anchor to adjust
  • move parameters from nets to params
  • change from: =colrow (and similar) to from: "{{colrow}}"

Still to figure out:

• everything I didn't need for my own board, if you know anything missing, hit me up/PR/issue/msg me on discord @Anarc :thumbsup:

Example

Here we have a little example that forms a 2-key board, complete with case and pcb.

If you're looking for something I didn't cover in "Necessary Steps", your best bet will be to check out the other examples in Other Examples & Thanks, this will just be most of the steps I discovered so far in action.

Units

Nothing to change here as far as I know.

# v3 & v4
units:
  center_shift_x: 170
  center_shift_y: -165

Points

# v3
points:
  zones:
    matrix:
      anchor: # this will still be anchor!
        shift: [ center_shift_x, center_shift_y ]
      columns:
        outer:
          key:
            col_net: c0
        pinky:
          stagger: .5cy             # move this into key
          key:
            col_net: c1
      rows:
        extra:
          row_net: r0
  key:
    padding: cy
    footprints:                     # move this into pcbs
      choc_hotswap:
        type: choc                  # change to "what: choc"
        nets:                       # move content to params
          from: =colrow             # turn this into "{{colrow}}"
          to: =col_net              # turn this into "{{col_net}}"
        params:
          keycaps: true
          reverse: true
          hotswap: true
      diode:
        type: diode                 # change to "what: diode"
        params:
          through_hole: false       # no through_hole option is gone now? :sad_face:
        nets:                       # move content to params
          from: =colrow             # turn this into "{{colrow}}"
          to: =row_net              # turn this into "{{col_net}}"
        anchor:                     # rename to adjust
          shift: [ 0, -5 ]

# v4
points:
  zones:
    matrix:
      anchor:
        shift: [ center_shift_x, center_shift_y ]
      columns:
        outer:
          rows.extra.skip: false
          key.col_net: c0
        pinky:
          rows:
            extra:
              skip: false
          key:
            stagger: .5cy
            col_net: c1
      rows:
        extra:
          skip: true
          row_net: r0
  key:
    padding: cy

Outlines

# v3
outlines:
  exports:
    switches:
      - type: keys
        side: left                  # this will be gone, I think replaced with where logic, but split ones didn't need it anyway (at least I didn't)
        size: 14
    switches_lips:
      - type: rectangle
        size: [ 15, 14 ]
    board:
      - type: rectangle
        anchor:                     # rename this to adjust
          ref: matrix_pinky_extra
          shift: [ -.5cx, -.25cy ]
        size: [ 30, 30 ]
        corner: 5
      - -switches

...digivolves to...

# v4
outlines:
  _switches:
    - what: rectangle
      where: true
      size: 14
      bound: false
  _switches_lips:
    - what: rectangle
      where: true
      size: [ 15, 14 ]
      bound: false
  _pcb:
    - what: rectangle
      adjust:
        ref: matrix_pinky_extra
        shift: [ -.5cx, -.25cy ]
      size: [ 50, 50 ]
      corner: 5
  plate:
    - _pcb
    - -_switches
  _plate_with_lips:
    - _pcb
    - -_switches_lips

PCBs

So I didn't want to blow this example up, but obviously you could have footprints in here already, and they would need to same modifications as the ones in points. You only need to add where if you want to have your footprint per point tho!

To make the comparison easier, here's also the footprints from earlier again:

# v3 points.key
footprints:                     # move this into pcbs
  choc_hotswap:
    type: choc                  # change to "what: choc", and since there's no anchor, add "where: true" to apply to all points
    class: S                    # change to "designator: S"
    nets:                       # move content to params
      from: =colrow             # turn this into "{{colrow}}"
      to: =col_net              # turn this into "{{col_net}}"
    params:
      keycaps: true
      reverse: true
      hotswap: true
  diode:
    type: diode                 # change to "what: diode"
    params:
      through_hole: false       # no through_hole option is gone now? :sad_face:
    nets:                       # move content to params
      from: =colrow             # turn this into "{{colrow}}"
      to: =row_net              # turn this into "{{col_net}}"
    anchor:                     # rename to adjust
      shift: [ 0, -5 ]

...and the actual pcbs field from before:

# v3
pcbs:                               # see points.key.footprint
  my_pcb:
    outlines:
      main:
        outline: board

# v4
pcbs:
  my_pcb:
    outlines:
      main:
        outline: _pcb
    footprints:
      choc_hotswap:
        what: choc
        where: true
        designator: S
        params:
          keycaps: true
          reverse: true
          hotswap: true
          from: "{{colrow}}"
          to: "{{col_net}}"
      diode:
        what: diode
        where: true
        params:
          from: "{{colrow}}"
          to: "{{row_net}}"
        adjust:
          shift: [ 0, -5 ]

Cases

Again, nothing to change here! (I think)

# v3 & v4
cases:
  my_plate:
    - name: board
      extrude: 1.2
      shift: [ -center_shift_x, -center_shift_y, 0 ]
    - name: _plate_main_lips
      extrude: 1
      shift: [ -center_shift_x, -center_shift_y, 1.2 ]

Other Examples & Thanks

Other v4 examples (both with more things than mine here):

• https://gitlab.com/Audijo/keyboard/-/blob/master/claw.yaml by @LogicJB
• https://github.com/MrCarney/mrkeyboard/blob/main/mrkeyboard.yaml by @PedroTheIntern

They are also what I used to figure out what to do, so kudos to their efforts of scouring through v4 without help!

Difference between Splay and Rotate

As promised, here's a comparison of the two (courtesy of @Cache):

Here's what rotate and splay do in v4:

rotate	splay

In conclusion: you'll probably want splay, but rotate might now be interesting for your curved thumb cluster.