Hand-wired, 3D printed case, laser cut switch plate, “laser dye sub” keycaps, custom layout.
Posted this on a couple of communities a while back, but I just subbed here and this board has actually worked really well.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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I Made This
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How did you make the internal circuitry?
I have not yet dived into PCB design, so this is a hand-wire. The brains are a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller unit running a keyboard Python package called KMK. The switches under the keycaps are manually soldered in a matrix, with diodes to allow a human number of i/o signals (rather than a dedicated one for every single key) but still prevent the RPi from accidentally detecting ghost keys.
Nothing new under the sun here, and I have learned a lot from the various resources out there, but there are not a ton of people doing their own keycap legends (this batch is underwhelming in color, but very serviceable), and most handwires tend to be ergonomic models that are more off the beaten path than this layout, which, TBH, is quirky but has a ton of keys and is pretty similar to several off the shelf models.
I do think it's a really cool project, I am more of a completely custom keycap kind of guy but thanks nonetheless
Understandable. I stay cheap on my keycaps, but I do have some Akko SA-L on a (slightly) more traditional TKL-like I did before this one, and I do like my bright little plastic nuggets, though I fell down a different rabbit hole within the hobby.
These started as blank PBT in XDA. I needed non-sculpted and blank modifiers to accommodate all my no-stabilizers shenanigans, so I used "infusible ink" markers to color in the tops and then precisely heated them with my laser engraver and cleaned with acetone. Lasers and acetone would be very bad for ABS.