I'm finally ready to show my latest creation to the world
It all started with the idea of saving some bucks with layered custom keyboards, so I decided to try ply wood that is relatively inexpensive to laser cut.
This was the idea:
and this is exploded to see how it works. No visible screws.
Basically everything is held together by glue. The top frame holds the plate that lays inside an 1.5mm inset.
After one week I had all the raw layers
Wood is a bastard. It takes a lot of carpentry job to make it look nice, and ply is not the nicest of the wood options. Also, while with metal you can be very tight with your measurement, with wood you need a good millimeter of margin. So if you are going to design something similar remember to make everything 1mm larger than it needs to be.
Glued together this is how it looked (still no finish)
I added two layers of something that here is called "pore filler" (I don't know the English term, sorry), it is basically a base coat to make the wood water and bugs proof. Then stained with a natural dye.
Lastly I added some wood oil for final protection and also weathered the aluminum plate a little to make the end result uniform.
The hole you see under the spacebar is for the teensy.
Time for the home-made PCB.
Before the treatment.
And ready to solder
Everything soldered and ready for firmware!
To hold the bottom steel plate to the wood case I used these bad boys. They are wood nuts with just 2mm thread!
And this is how the back looks like with those micro-screws
A lot of blood and sweat later I finally I have the best keyboard I've ever built (so far)
and here with Granite
If you are interested I will post the full CAD files, I have to make some changes to the prototype to make it perfect first. But as I said, wood is bìtch
Very easy to work but it took me a lot of time to make it look half decent.
Now since everyone seems scared about how a wood keyboard sounds, this is a sample with MX Blue:
https://soundcloud.com/matt3oaudio/robot-65-custom-keyboard-sound-testThe steel bottom seems to add a lot of stability (and ballast) and at the end it eliminates reverberation completely.
Thanks for watching. See you next time!