Thanks for the replies and welcome to the new members. :-)
I try not to answer after every single post because that would clutter the thread but it looks like I waited a bit too long.
Personally i don't really understand Soldering, If i choose No Soldering, does that means the keyboard will comes with all parts Soldered without the need for us to solder the keyboard ourselves?
Prefer the keyboard to comes in completed so we can use directly, and then think about DIY the keyboard and add on the other stuff ourselves.
There will be at least some minor assembly to do. Doing a kit has other advantages beside lower cost. EMI testing for example.
Just spent the last 2 hours reading all 51 pages.
I'm in for one, no matter the price.
Took me over a year to read those. :-)
Edit: Hmm I might be interested. Will the soldering be done for us if we pay extra?
I cannot predict if I will get this organised. Maybe someone will step forward and do assembly for some compensation.
Hey lowpoly, I live in the US, and there has GOT to be a large enough market to make this into a real product. If Das Keyboard can sell well enough, how could this one not?
Let's chat man, I wanna figure out how to make this into a real product. Let me know if there is any way I can help. I'm sure we can find some vc's/use kick starter to get this going.
There are already people who may provide some basic funding (more can't hurt though). For VCs the kit version is too small and mass production won't work. I can't use kickstarter as I'm not US-based.
I agree, if you get into this keyboard some kind of scrolling tool, ideally something like the logitech hyperscroll wheel... well, you are in a whole different game. No need to touch a mouse, ever.
In Firefox there's Scrollbar Anywhere which uses the right mouse button. I have to stay with the pointing stick for now.
Thanks Raeb. It's not exactly that I have a particular scrolling problem that I want this keyboard to solve; certainly with programmable firmware anyone could make it, say, swirl button + trackpoint motion = scrolling, or something like that. it's just that it occurred to me two trackpoints for two index fingers might possibly be "kinda nifty" for a 100%-home-row use case, so I wanted to throw that out in the open 
True, with the Teensy, any button can become a mouse button.
For a small quantity run such as this, I'd be quite surprised if the cost came in under what a new HHKB goes for.
I'd be surprised too.
Anyway, my plan was to finish the pcb, then do the case construction. However, I had a look at my local CNC forum and have seen some crazy prices for custom machined parts. So I'm not going to wait any longer with the case because another kill criterium may be waiting here.
With the pcb, I'm going to use Kicad, which is open source. Still trying to get the hang of it and I have to start with custom parts. I think I'll try the 4 layer pcb with an individual led matrix on a different layer for the first release (I'm still surprised nobody responded to this). While this looks a bit overwhelming to me at the moment, it's just a switch pcb after all. It can't be
that difficult.
