lowpoly, In case you'll be back in the future here are some advice from a fellow keyboard builder that may help you.
First, consider 3D printing the case instead of milling it.
Shapeways is the way to go. There are
various materials on your disposal with different structural, mechanical and optical characteristics, and of course with different costs. You could even
open your shop there, upload the case design and sell the cases without you doing any additional work for some profit. Customers could choose which material they prefer and order whatever they like. It'd be also useful to try to Rit Dye some of the prints. Even if you'll ultimately choose to mill the case, 3D printing is the choice of rapid prototyping technology for this kind of work to do some initial iterations and refine your model.
Second, I think that aiming for LED backlighting is overkill, especially considering your modest skills (no offense) in this specific area. You should first try to design a 2-layer PCB first without LEDs. gEDA and KiCad are free packages but they are very much limited. Eagle is a semi-professional package providing acceptable productivity. It's
not cheap for the size of your PCB but you may wanna find a friend who has it on his computer and use Eagle on his machine. (I'm not advocating piracy, just trying to explain that using a low-end package will make your work very hard.) As for PCB design software OrCAD and Altium Designer is the **** if you happen to have a small fortune, but those are probably overkill for a relatively simple PCB like yours.
Third, as for manufacturing the PCB, you could choose the same "upload your design, make others manufacture it and profit from it" approach as in the case of Shapeways shops with
BatchPCB. If you choose this way then go through-hole for easy manual assembly but if you wanna get the PCBs assembled then using surface mount components would be more economical and in this case
E-TekNet is the way to go but they don't provide you a shop because that wouldn't make much sense for individual orders considering the high setup costs of pick and place machines so you've gotta mass order in this case.
Fourth, you should use an AVR as the MCU with a USB core. The ATmega*U* and AT90USB* family will work well for sure.
Online and
library support is great and you can do all kinds of fancy things with a general purpose MCU like that. Reading (bit-banging) PS/2 signals (for the trackpoint) in an interrupt handler while communicating through USB is solvable with a single MCU. Just make sure you breadboard your circuit before ordering any PCBs. The Teensy (or any developer board that utilize the above MCUs) is good for breadboarding. As these MCUs are only available in SMD packages you'll have to break them out (with a breakout board) if you wanna make a through-hole design for manual assembly.
Now to my questions:
Anyone knows where to get plate mountable Cherry stabilizers?
Where did you get the trackpad from and what's the price for various quantities?
PS.: If you have any questions, please PM me. I won't watch this thread (or any threads on Geekhack) because vBulletin is a joke in this respect (and in general) and I surely won't webscrape Geekhack to provide RSS
as I did with OCN.
