Author Topic: Bamboo and metal Matias 5x2 macro pad [Now finished and photos posted]  (Read 3048 times)

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Offline JohanAR

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  • Location: Sweden
I'm planning to build a Nyquist and bought the electronics, but I haven't decided which switch to use and I've never done any laser cutting before so I thought I'd start with a practice project. For switches I'm leaning towards MX Silent Reds since I currently have Reds that I like but my wife thinks are too loud, however it would be fun to try out the Matias Linear so I ordered a handful of those (and some Matias Quiet Click because why not).

For design I'm using swillkb's tool and inkscape so I've been fighting with those two while reading up on different materials, kerf sizes and whatnot

The recommended switch plate thickness for Matias is 1.1 (+/- 0.1) mm which seems a bit thin for plastic so I went with a 1mm steel switch plate from Lasergist. It's quite thin even for metal but I'm not too worried about flex due to the small size of the kbd.

Ponoko offers $20 off your first order so I thought I'd try them for the sandwich layers. Put all the necessary parts (I hope I didn't miss any) on a P1 sheet which is recommended for bamboo. Opted for 6.7mm thickness so I'll only need one of each middle layer to get >12mm internal space, which ought to be enough for hand-wiring and an Arduino Pro Micro. 4 layers (bottom, open middle, closed middle and top frame) fit perfectly on a P1 but I needed to add an extra since I'm building two macro pads. With a 6.7mm bottom plate the box is going to be very tall but I think it will be ok since it's not for typing. I haven't figured out exactly how to attach everything together. From the beginning I was thinking about using a 20mm M2 screw through the whole thing but with the thick bottom and frame this won't be enough. Might have to drill out the middle layers to fit a spacer in there. Work and material ended up less than $20 but the shipping was $34 so it wasn't quite gratis

Finally I ordered some Alps-compatible blank 1u DSA keys from PMK.

I haven't ordered the microcontrollers yet but I think I can buy those locally. Not entirely sure how to fix the MCU PCB inside or how to attach a USB cable in a good looking way but I'll improvise something I guess

All orders have been placed so I hope I can start building in about a month. Will update when I start receiving things.
« Last Edit: Mon, 27 November 2017, 09:14:16 by JohanAR »

Offline JohanAR

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Re: Bamboo and metal Matias 5x2 macro pad
« Reply #1 on: Mon, 27 November 2017, 09:13:46 »


Finally got all the parts. Ordered M2 screws, spacers, wires and MCUs from banggood.com and scavenged some micro USB cables that were about to be thrown away at work.

Had to enlarge the holes in the middle layers to fit the spacers but luckily I know a few guys that own a makerspace where I could borrow a drill press



There were so few keys so I could use a dedicated digital IO for each instead of bothering with a matrix. The thin wires broke a few times so I had to resolder a couple of them



USB plug fit perfectly in the hole with a minimal amount of filing. It fit so tightly that I didn't even have to attach the Pro Micro to anything inside the case.



Wrote my own firmware using Arduino's HID and keyboard library. Originally I had planned to map the keys to F13 through F22 since I thought they would be unused. The keyboard lib didn't support sending those codes though so I copied parts of it into my own project and hacked it a bit. Unfortunately it turned out that those keys have been mapped to extended functions in Linux and I didn't want to start launching programs by accident so instead I mapped them to numpad 0 through 9.



Bought two different colors for the two macropads I'm building



Experimented a bit with mixing colors but I thought it looked bad on the keyboard since there are so many different materials already.



Finally done!



Wrote a symbol table so that the key codes are translated to unicode cat face emojis instead of boring numbers. The complete layout is:

🙀🐱😸😹😺
😻😼😽😾😿

(if your OS + browser supports unicode)