First discussion point: I can't find an antonym for Phantom, so I was looking at synonyms for light. I couldn't even name my own children if not for my wife, so I'll leave the discussion to you, the interested.
2nd point: Back in July/August I saw
this mod here on GH and endeavored to duplicate it as a clean PCB design for the Filco 87 case. siberx had plans for his design so I had to go it mostly alone with a little component choice assistance from him. I have the PCB design fab ready, and have a small LED test board to test software design. Never got around to the software to validate my components, so that's where it stands.
I got in touch with siberx and it turns out he's pretty close to open-sourcing the project which means we'll be able to piggy-back his hard work on the software side (and maybe even invalidate my component choices). Either way it looks like this is a good candidate for the next KB kit to be available here. Perhaps we can lean on litster's acrylic case designs for even more LED goodness.
Consider this an ADVANCED soldering project as the LED controller chips and the diodes I've chosen are surface mount devices (SMD). It would likely be impossible to do this type of design without surface mount parts as there is a huge amount of traces and both sides of the board are well used for this. I'm also interested in moving to integrating the MCU into the keyboard. My biggest issue with that is losing the rather awesome halfkay bootloader that is only available with the teensy.
I'm also interested in including the CMStorm case design, if there are any owners that are willing to take certain measurements inside their KB that would help.
tl;dr - 87 key backlit design with individually controllable LEDs using SMD components.
Things people are interested in:
104 key design
87 key design
fit into a 'cheap' case (g80-3000 for instance)
individually controlled LEDs
no SMD OR SMD done by the PCB factory
integrated MCU
N-key diodes (isn't this a given?)
plate not required (PCB mount switch holes)
the ever-requested trackpoint