This is the content I come here for. These all look amazing and from what I can tell are largely 3d printed, outside of a few plates which appear to be aluminum sandwich cases. Big fan of using home manufacturing tools to make keyboards, doubly so for hand wired! I would love to see the guts of those boards.
Hey, thanks. The way I've justified this rabbit hole is by making things not exactly available (except for that macropad, but that was a project for and with kiddo). I dug up a construction pic for each of them. Gallery
HERE. They all use KMK on RP2040 MCU's.
I've put them in chronological order.
- A Planck MIT layout, except with an extra column of three keys, which makes it a lot more noob friendly. It could benefit from stabilizers, but you can get away with leaving them off on 2u keys at the cost of some wobbliness. Plate is 3D printed, base is maple or pear... something light. Gateron KS-3 blue, and it's had various keycaps on it as I tried to optimize it, and then sort of demoted it to headless media-pc duty. Don't judge. :-)
- The macropad. Just downloaded this from Thingiverse and printed it. I offered to reorient the keycaps to fit the "typing" angle, but she likes it 3x4 instead of its intended 4x3. It is set up to spit out strings of the grossest text I would let a 4th grader get away with, and her gleeful cackles made it all worth it.
- A bespoke ortholinear split with a single MCU and fixed wiring. Fully 3D printed. This one was a mess of biting off more than I could chew and a questionable layout. It could support a big 1u column stagger for the pinky, or none at all with some oddly placed modifiers. I wanted to love it more than I did, but it works fine. Commodity brown with cheap XDA, some of which were added later as part of my experiments with laser dye-sub at home.
- I tweaked the TKL layout on KLE and had three sets of aluminum top & bottom plates cut by Xometry. I wanted something that would evoke various retro keyboards without being too alien to use. This first one is a bit rawer than it's younger siblings, but with a fairly low profile, some awesome Box Navy, and "VSA" keycaps that fit the look I wanted and split the difference between DSA and XDA (except the F-row keys... those ARE DSA), it's proven to be the one I enjoy typing on the most. I shouldn't have split the LShift, but otherwise I have literally no complaints about the layout. The sandwich is Red Oak with Danish oil, but it's not jointed to itself, so I will (someday) redo it. The only 3D printed parts are a pair of blockers by the MCU, one of which lets a power LED shine through.
- TKL build number two. This one with pre-lubed browns and "CSA" keycaps. Instead of a full sandwich case, it has two 3D printed wedges for the sides at a shallow angle (I want to say 5 degrees, but maybe less), and the middle is supported by springs. Being effectively a single giant leaf spring, it's pretty flexy, but not unpleasantly so. I also polished the plate a little and filed the LShift opening so it could be installed properly ISO style with the 1.25u on the outside. It's nice; I just find I like heavier switches.
- Took a 96% and shrunk down any key larger than 1.75u so I wouldn't need stabilizers at all. This meant I could cut the entire thing, including the switchplate, myself out of 1/8" (3mm) "Masonite" hardboard. My laser is quite cheap and weak, a Comgrow Z1 with the 5W module, but it can cut hardboard in two passes. The hardboard itself is very weak torsionallly, but if supported it's pretty durable, and it takes paint very well. With so many weird key widths, I knew I had to use non-sculpted. I used the laser to do custom legends on blank PBT DSA keycaps by coloring in entire keycaps with a Cricut "infusible ink" marker and then running the laser "low and slow", with acetone to dissolve any ink that didn't get heated by the laser. I was a bit ambitious with this one, and didn't have proper jigging, so it's kinda cross-eyed when you look at it, but the actual transfer came out nicely. It has Gateron Green, which is okay, but I actually like Outemu better for heavy clickjacket switches. I do use this board for work quite a bit. The back feet and the cover for the opening onto the MCU are 3D printed. Hadn't quite learned my lesson yet that I will never like ISO style LShift.
- TKL Build three. This one got a full 3D printed case (vaguely inspired by Atari 8-bit computers and painted a very '70s yellow) to surround the plates, and the white wedges are below the bottom plate to create a more unified look. I was getting better at the wiring and supporting the MCUs by this point, so it uses a short extension and a glorified grommet for strain relief. Switches are "Fauxly Panda" heavy tactiles from AliExpress, and the keycaps are Akko SA-L where the bottom four rows are R3, and the top two are R4. This one has a pretty harsh bottom-out, but otherwise it's nice; I am in my heart a heavy clicky guy, but I do like it with the heavy tactiles.
- I refined the no-stabs 96% a bit for usability (looks are subjective), and also just added MOAR KEYS. I think this one landed at 102. The plates are hardboard, but I adapted the two-part captive-plate 3D printed case from the previous build and tried to refine it a bit. I did my own legends again. The alignment was much better this time, both because of a better jig and because moving to corner legends meant consistency was more important than millimeter accuracy (centering is HARD, man!). Unfortunately, the ink didn't dye-sub quite as well onto the XDA blanks, but they're still very usable. The MCU lives in a little 3D-printed caddy slung underneath the bottom plate, and I simply printed two more of the feet from the first Masonite board. Flex is not problematic, but if it were, another foot would fix it up. Box Jades are almost as nice as Navy, but not quite.
- Because I really have been using the TKLs a lot, particularly the first one, I wanted a numpad. This one was designed in one evening, and fabricated the next day. Hardboard again, this time with a textured Rustoleum that came out really nice. The MCU lives up top, and the standard breadboard headers go far enough through the hardboard to solder pretty easily. It's got a fairly big footprint and I wouldn't recommend it for someone who wants to nestle it up against the right side of the keyboard, but works well to the left or offset. It is within 1mm of the height of the board it will be used with most often, so that was nice (if a bit more luck than skill). I used up spare KS-3 blue from that original Planck-style build, and the same VSA keycaps as the first TKL. If somebody wanted to try building their own split boards, this would be a really cheap way to get into it if they have access to almost any gantry-mounted laser, and I like the look just a bit more than craft plywood. No 3D printing at all on this one. The spacers are 1cm discs originally nested inside the keyswitch cutouts during the lasering.
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