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Around a year and a half ago I started making my own keyboards. Like, I still use normal switches, normal keycaps, and off-the-shelf microcontrollers & firmware, but the layout and the structure are my own design, mostly fabricated at home. After a few experiments (one ortho, one ergo, one macropad, and one gutting of a broken off-the-shelf to try something larger) , I had three keyboards' worth of aluminum plates made. One was pretty basic but has remained a favorite and another really hit my retro intent for the design, but the second was sort of an ignored middle-child because it wasn't as refined as the third, or as earnest and satisfying as the first. I fixed it by designing a wrap-around case for it, changing the keycaps, and adding a little solenoid so it sounds like a telegraph machine whenever I flip a little switch. I'm really pleased that I was able to retrofit it to make it stupidly fun to type on. My boards are not exactly the perfectly-finished CNC aluminum showpieces some enjoy, but it's deeply satisfying to go from a pile of electronic bits, some sheet goods, and a reel of printer filament, to a functioning piece of daily-use equipment.
pics
This looks awesome man. You got any with numpad?
Oh hell yes, the compact layouts that keep their numpads are my usual preference, though in adding numpads I also decided to do my own plates on my home laser, and that was easier without longer keys, so they got a little... weird.
More pics! Love the yellow and gray builds.
Thanks! They're the twins of the one I just spruced up. The gray one is bare aluminum with oak spacers. Construction wise, it ended up looking a LOT like Matt3o's BrownFox from like ten years earlier. No surprise, I suspect. The Swill plate generator I used was likely borne out of people wanting to do similar projects. It has Box Navy switches combined with Vortex-designed VSA keycaps that you can find mislabeled all over ebay/AliExpress/etc. as "double shot DSA", except for the BBC Micro inspired F row, with is just 12 red DSA blanks and one that I lasered a design onto.
pic
The yellow one has "Fauxly Panda" no-name heavy tactiles from Aliexpress, a 3-D printed case and feet, Akko "SA-L" keycaps, and a design (very) loosely inspired by the later Atari 8-bits. The color scheme is meant to sort of vaguely evoke the original 400 and 800. I am really pleased with this layout, which is just a TKL with the F-row shoved over, a few missing keys above the nav cluster, the Shifts split in two, and the modifiers shrunk down and reduced to give that "dangling spacebar" look so many old keyboards have. Only thing I'd do different is not split the left Shift. I just never got used to having two keys there, so all three boards now just map shift to both keys.
pic
This has been an immensely fun hobby, and I've probably done a dozen projects by now, though I've probably topped out how refined my designs can be and still be fabbed on a 5W diode laser and an Ender 3 clone. Last project before the solenoid and aesthetic retrofit was my goofy no-stabilizers Battlecruiser, which I'm currently using for work.