I needed a new keyboard and I decided my trusty TypeMatrix 2020 could be improved upon. After some searching I found Jesse's Keyboard.IO
http://launch.keyboard.io/ which looked most like what I wanted. But it's not available yet
So I decided to make something like it - slightly different, but I want to give credit to a big part of the design inspiration/plagiarism! I hope it's ok to do a one-off home-build that draws fairly heavily from another design? Also I was influenced by Oobly's board - that looks pretty amazing, but angled thumbs was beyond me for a first build.
Anyway, here's the pictures:
4 layers: 3mm acrylic base, 10mm acrylic spacer, 1.5mm steel plate, 10mm acrylic top.
Wiring detail. Diodes put on the columns because they're straight and the rows aren't. Switches are angled at 90 degrees to their normal orientation to make the pins in a better position for routing the row wires and diodes.
Wiring overview.
Stripboard design, to mount Teensy 2.0 board inverted. Hole cut to allow space for mini USB connector and another hole cut for the reset button, for re-programming it.
Wiring detail of board connections. Messy soldering on top-right - my tip was near the end of its poor life
Wire routing could have been better, but it fits - just.
I went for Clear switches.
The end result. I named it Bison because I think the hand clusers look like the shape of a Bison
Apart from a couple of bug fixes in my firmware (right hand not working -> change uint_8 to uint_16 - if only all bugs would be this easy) it went smoothly, which was a bit unexpected!
I have a key layout I'm fairly happy with, but I'm a bit rubbish on it at the moment - 3 keys is something my thumbs need a little time to get used to!
DXF files if anyone's interesting in them:
KB023 layer1 3mm acrylic.DXF (36.97 kB - downloaded 373 times.)
KB023 layer2 10mm acrylic.DXF (38.89 kB - downloaded 376 times.)
KB023 layer3 1.5mm steel.DXF (58.7 kB - downloaded 378 times.)
KB023 layer4 10mm acrylic.DXF (40.6 kB - downloaded 381 times.)
Thankyou all for your lovely site which was a great source of information! I knew not the first thing about keyboard construction a few weeks ago.