Well, I was going to wait until I was completely done, but after getting it at this point, I was so excited I had to share. The PCB fits in the
Planck formed bottom, and in theory it should fit into the
Planck milled bottom. Getting one of those to test/validate with is on my list, but it was out of my r&d budget. At this point I don't have enough Cherry MX RGB switches to finish this particular project, but I will hopefully have some
Zealios on the way in a few weeks.
For the longest time I was pretty adamant about not wanting/needing a 40% keyboard. It felt like there were too many compromises and limited case options to show off the small size. The plate-based cases are brilliantly simple and really practical, but the extra length and width for the standoffs bothered me - even though I more or less have that kind of design on my
59% keyboard. Then along came jackhumbert and the Planck, complete with milled cases and cheaper formed bottoms - just what I needed.
I had a picture of
the bare board, but it's rather plain. Skipping ahead, my not-particularly-elegant solution for controlling the
RGB Lite-On LTST-C19HE1WT LEDs was born out of practicality more than anything. The keyboard is running a variant of
QMK Firmware which is, of course, a variant of
Hasu's TMK firmware. QMK has really good support for WS2812 LEDs for the underglow that people have been adding to their Plancks. Well, WS2812s are just a WS2811 integrated into an LED, so I covered the entire back of the board in
WS2811s to control my LEDs.
All I can say is that it took a lot of patience to solder all of that mess. My only problem was that I used an ATMEGA32U2 so I could fit everything better. QMK didn't really support anything other than the ATMEGA32U4, so I had to branch off and make more changes to work with the U2. Anyway, it works, the lighting effects are fun. I'll have to go back in and put in some kind of max brightness limit to keep it from going over the 500mw USB spec. I saw it spike up to ~800mw at one point, but it works fine if I keep the brightness down. In these photos it's hovering around 120-200mw and it looks great in person.
I built it for myself, so this is pretty much it for layout options. You get something close-to-normal, or something really bizarre-o with impossible-to-find 0.75 width keycaps. I built the crazy version, so...
Next up... figuring out what keycaps to wear.
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2016.05.05 - It fits nicely into the planck milled bottom.
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2016.07.18 Edit: I haven't had a chance to clean this up and add some more layouts for the next revision, but I've attached the files (Kicad) for Revision 6.
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2016.09.05 Edit: I have a new revision that added some other layouts. I'll post it up soon (rev 7), but for an idea I put things up on the KLE:
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/cc590136479f132aded5b4cfb4ef0066This what I was using as a guide, but it's not the best pic: