The NCKB 50% keyboard

[simpe]

The keyboard was built as a high school graduation project, trough the UF-project, in witch students are supposed to start a temporary company and develop a product. We named the company NCKB – Nordic Compact Keyboard, since that was the product that we wanted to develop. Under the past year we then proceeded to develop the keyboard you see here today. The keyboard has a 50% layout, which support extra space for Nordic and German keys such as Å, Ä, Ö, Ü etc, unlike the 40% layouts we see today.

The largest and hardest part of the project was to develop the PCB, since we built it from the ground up using KiCad and a very helpful guide from Ruiqimao. Since we never used the program before we also got help from a friend of mine, a student at Chalmers Technical University, who taught us the program. After the PCB was drawn we ordered it from china and solder it together, using a solder oven for the SMD-components, and an iron for the switches. All was not good directly though, it appeared we had missed to put power to the VBUS, the port on the microchip that enables the USB, but it was fixable with a jumpwire, and the keyboard works flawlessly. This problem has now been addressed in the newest version of the PCB.
The plate is just 5mm acrylic that we had lasercut. There were planes for a 3D-printed case, but that never happened due to problems with the printer, so we were left with this kind of floating design with screw legs. It runs on a ATMEGA32u4 (same as pro micro) with the QMK-firmware, a huge shout out to Jack Humbart and contributors for making it so easy to use and understand.

Since the project is coming to a close we are not sure what will happen to the board, we don’t really have any possibilities to mass produce and sell them ourselves. Depending on time I might continue to develop it even after the project is over, but nothing is certain. If anyone got any interest in buying/taking over the projects let us know, we put a lot of time in to it and would love to see it reach the market.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions
//The NCKB dev team

[pngu]

Hey simpe! That's an awesome project to do during high school. I have some input regarding the future of this I'd like you guys to consider:

This is a niche within a niche, I'm not sure there's going to be a lot of commercial interest (by manufacturers) in this. You guys could either do an IC and GB (including a refined case and plate) as a way to see your baby getting some real-world use and appreciation, or you could opensource it under CC or GPL and put whatever material you have on Github for the community to build upon or learn from it. Perhaps both, since you seem to have all the technicalities resolved.

Either way you should definitely put this into your resumees, having designed a fully-functional, thought-through "interface device" is quite the feat and definitely interesting to potential employers in the future, not only in Electronics/IT or Industrial Design but in general as this is far beyond anything I've seen done as a school project. Hats off to you!

Edit: One thing I'd like to learn about was your teachers' and classmates' response to this. There's people out there that don't even know what a mechanical keyboard is, and the 50% form factor must be bewildering at first sight (along with the price point for "half a keyboard", how much could it cost, 10$?). Any funny incidents?

[Vulcan]

i think that is very good, nice job

[simpe]

Edit: One thing I'd like to learn about was your teachers' and classmates' response to this. There's people out there that don't even know what a mechanical keyboard is, and the 50% form factor must be bewildering at first sight (along with the price point for "half a keyboard", how much could it cost, 10$?). Any funny incidents?

Thank you for the kind response, ill make a stand for it to be a open source project, since our school time with the project is comming to an close. Since im not alone in making that decision, ill discuss it with my group. Should not be to hard though since im the one with the major keyboardintresst, and i dont really think they have that big of an intresst for it after we are done.

The hard part about this was what we were supposed to be a "company" and that we were supposed to sell (theoreticly or litterally) our product , as you can imagine, that was quite hard to sell this idea to people who hardly know what a mechanical keyboard is. The response mostly ended with people not understanding what they was looking at, or them just asking "why". We were also never able to produce more of them, as we dont have accessability to a soldering oven, other than that one we borrowed on an university while making the first prototype.

The respose from the teachers were mixed, the electronic-teachers thoght it was really cool how we had managed to build something like that, while the others  looked like questionmarks. The rest of the class was about the same.

The "funniest" incident gotta be the Pin that we forgott to connect to power, it was like 4 in the morning when i realised it, after we had been working on the board since like 6 in the evening the day before (mostly soldering and later troubleshooting the damn USB).

I still thought that the project was really fun though, and i learned a great deal. Lets see if the board can become a reallity

[MC Qwerty]

Yeah dude this looks awesome good job,
if you put in group buy and was good price would consider picking up