After being on this forum for a while, I've slowly grown more and more attached to these things called "keyboards". After seeing all the different types of keyboards available, I turned to custom/DIY keyboards and was even more amazed to see what kind of things people came up with. I always thought that it would be cool to type on something you made yourself. With that in mind, I'm now interested in designing and possibly building my own keyboard sometime in the future. At this point in time I'm just in the brainstorming and idea stage, but I'd like to take you guys with me every step of the way. I think I'll be running this as a journal sort of thing, and I will be continuously updating it whenever something interesting happens, so expect this intro to change later on, or maybe not. Anyway, let's get started with my "I don't even know" custom keyboard. Also, any input would greatly help.
Link To Project Album: http://imgur.com/a/DLzFJ#0
D/M/Y
04/10/2013
So after thinking about whether to do my own custom board, or do something like a Phantom or ErgoDox, I finally decided to do a custom keyboard. Being my first custom keyboard, and my first big project in terms of electronics, I decided to do a plate mounted keyboard that is direct wired instead of utilizing a PCB. This may change in the future, but for now I'd like to keep it simple and preferably relatively inexpensive. The first step I took was figuring out what kind of layout I wanted. I'm still unsure of what I want but I'm thinking something along the lines of this (sorry about the background. It uploaded to imgur like that):
More
(http://i.imgur.com/XRrFCm6.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/gphMfLI.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/yB88jHe.jpg)
As you can see, they are more or less the same, except that one has the function keys layered on with the num keys, and the other has a 2.25x mod on the top right rather than a 1x and a 1.25x. I'm still unsure what layout I'd like to use.
05/10/2013
Decided on a layout, started designing layers. Here they are.
More
Base Layer
(http://i.imgur.com/5poIVcW.jpg)
Layer 1
(http://i.imgur.com/z7SYgMt.jpg)
Layer 2
(http://i.imgur.com/Vq5DfmD.jpg)
Layer 3
(http://i.imgur.com/z7SYgMt.jpg)
08/10/2013
After getting in contact with a few people and asking maaany questions, I finally contacted JDCarpe who was awesome and agreed to draw a plate for my project. Project is still unnamed. Created album for all project images.
Some people I'd like to thank (list will get larger as more and more people help out along the way):
Ne0phyte for showing me their awesome layout editor.
JDCarpe for drawing my plate