So late last year (2017) I discovered that building your own keyboard was a thing(!), and I subsequently fell down that particular, technological, rabbit hole. As a result, I ended up ordering various parts, from various places, especially China in the form of AliExpress. The picture above is what I ended up building.
4 or 5 weeks later everything had arrived, after a week or two of umming, ahhing and watching YouTube videos (including livestreams of people assembling these keyboards, on camera) I finally bit the bullet. Firstly I put the a few switches in place and soldered them, to hold the pcb and plate together. I then inserted the rest of them.
Once the groundwork was laid I could crack on, and solder the rest, but only after I'd made sure they were all fully pressed down into the pcb. Apparently this is why you buy plate mounted switches as they make this part easier, as they don't have the extra plastic pegs, that have to be forced into the pcb. My hands are throbbing with the memory of the pain that forcing the switches in caused. Eventually I could get on and solder everything in place!
After failing to realise that one of the switces in the bottom left corner was misaligned for the size of the keycaps I had, I ended up having to desolder it and move it across slightly before resoldering the whole thing back in the correct place. I was pleasantly surprised that this turned out to be the only physical issue I had making the keyboard.
Once all of that was done it had to be fastened into the case, the keycaps had to be added and the software (describing it's layout) had to be flashed to the board, and then it was all good to go.
I had a brief hiccup working out the correct designations for the characters on the key to the left of the z key on my layout (a fairly standard UK one) but eventually tracked one down online.
So I've built one, a 75%, or 84 key one. I currently have all of the parts for a 40% keyboard, but haven't had the time to do anything with them yet. This hasn't stopped me from ordering parts to make a second, different 40% one, everything except the keycaps which I'm sure I'll get round to soon. I also have stuff to build some usb cables to go with them, but haven't gotten on to that either.
The mechanical keyboard bug has well, and truly bitten me.
My name is Dave Ames. I've been a teacher for 25 years and for the last few of those I've been teaching both children and other adults, especially teachers to program in a variety of environments, but mostly Python.
I guess when I get round to building my next keyboard, or those cables I mentioned, then I'll post about them too.
