On a scale of 1 - 10 how hard would this be for a person who has some soldering experience but hasn't dealt with mechanical keyboards at all? I'm very interested and want to make my first keyboard the best.
Shouldn't matter if you've ever touched a keyboard if you can solder.
Wow. People are buying the DIY kit for the build-it-yourself experience? I have decades of soldering experience, and don't think WFD went far enough in explaining just how delicate and unforgiving SMD soldering is. It is (literally) like soldering an ant to a piece of screen. One tiny ant-leg at a time. There is a reason these are done with pick-and-place
machines. It is really, really hard. And VERY hard to undo mistakes.
If you are a pretty good at soldering, then spend the $40 and get the ":assembled" board. You will
stil have to solder 120+ switch leads, at least one LED, burn the firmware, customize it if desired, etc. And that is with the NON-DIY kit.
If you've never soldered before, don't even think about the DIY kit. If you're handy with tools or have just a little soldering experience, then go to the local electronics recycling center, grab a few large circuit boards and spend a few evenings de-soldering and re-soldering the components with wire leads that
go through the board. That should give you plenty of experience to make this almost fun.
Also, get a
good soldering iron. I only use Weller irons, although there are some other good brands. There is a reason that some irons are $50 and some with the same specs are $5. Think of Weller as the Cherry MX of soldering equipment.
This is a keyboard forum, not a ham-radio forum. Absolutely zero people here will think any less of anyone for skipping the SMD part of this. And for sure you aren't going to save money unless you already have the equipment to do that delicate of a job.
If you have enough dexterity to care about keyboard switches, you can probably build one. But let the robots do their job first.
</rant>
WFD, thank you
very much for the warning message and the video!
Yet another good job in the GH60 stack of good jobs!
Cheers!
- Ron | samwisekoi