Sankets Journal

IRIS Vs Lily Vs Sofle

Author: Sanket Sonavane

Publish Date: 2023-01-27

Last Updated: 2023-01-27

Table Of Content

summary

sofle v2 :P

why sofle v2 > lily58 pro > iris rev7

It started with the IRIS group buy but as I started digging in to better understand the board I started seeing some shortcomings and also found that there are boards which might be more modular and flexible for my needs. this is what made me research lily 58 pro and then lead to sofle.

problems with iris

  • importing this is costly as we need to get the pcb from keebio
  • closed source
  • 54~56 keys based on how you do your thumb stack thats less keys than lily which is 58 keys
  • the microcontroller is soldered on the board, I prefer socketed microcontroller leaves room for swapping it out.

lily58 vs sofle

  • while lily58 is a good design with 58 keys sofle added 2 more keys
  • sofle (6×4+5 keys column-staggered split keyboard with encoder support) was created by Josef Adamčík
    • based on Lily 58 Pro , Corne and Helix
  • the lowered pinky keys placement and thumb cluster placement which is more to the left on the sofle v2 is a better design.

Lily 58 was also not built from scratch. In its licence file its written that it’s derived from Helix, Ergo42 and Corne AKA crkbd (which was also called Helidox and is based on Helix).

sofle codebase for QMK

  • Josef Adamcik used Lily 58 Pro as reference and cleaned all the code
  • so this is a much more streamlined and efficient code base which get rids of bits that are old or deprecated

PS I havent checked the code base myself yet.

sofle v1 to v2

  • SofleV1 was created as an improvement over Lily58 by adding two additional keys to the PCB and supports MX and choc hotswap sockets
  • SofleV2 was created as from scratch PCB over V1 and has updated the thumb and pinky finger placement but got rid of choc hotswap sockets and supports only MX hotswap
  • SofleV2 RGB was created by a community member as scratch PCB to add RGB to the board
  • SofleV2 Choc HotSwap was created by another community member as scratch PCB

sofle v2 community contributions

There is also other variations

read more https://josef-adamcik.cz/electronics/another_year_for_sofle.html

sofle v2 vs lily58 pro hand placement

to test your finger placement on these keyboards you can take a printout of these layout which are to scale on an A4 paper. Compare split keyboards

  • i applied following filters
    • number of keys 54 to 61
    • number of rows 4 to 6
  • use this link to generate PDF of sofle , lily58 , iris layout.
  • ensure when you take a printout dont apply any form of scaling and print these on A4 paper.
  • these are to scale printouts and they help you get a feel of how you fingers are placed on these various keyboards.
  • check all your finger movements while touch typing especially your pinky and the thumb placement.

PDF downloads

qmk configurator

Sofle QMK Configurator

footnotes

references