DIY keyboard project: Ww

[saulo]

Hi guys!

i’m new on the custom mechanical keyboard world but since a friend bought a mechanical keyboard i’ve been fascinated with this. I really like the whitefox keyboard but, as engineer, it’s very hard to live without numpad..

So, based on WhiteFox and Kira keyboards, i design this layout idea for a new kb:



i started to design it on Kicad as well:



show i like to discuss with you guys the feasibility of this layout and how we can reduce the cost of it. If this forum is not the right place to discuss this project, i will appreciate some guidance to move the discussion.

Best Regards,
Saulo

[codemonkeymike]

Reminds me a bit of the Red Scarf 96 (with arrows) https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mechani ... 61756.html . If you are looking for the cheapest thing then going PCB mount switches with no plate and maybe laser cut acrylic for the case. I am no expert on this but if you check the "workshop" section of the forum you will find a bunch of projects people have done or are currently doing with custom keyboards.

[saulo]

Yeah codemonkeymike, reminds the Scarf 96! i just make it more compact by removing the number row. Since this is my first project, i will make it with PCB mount switches and without led, just some leds for caps lock and for a special latch key that i will put on right Win key.

I'm looking for companies that can make the keycaps printing, it is just WASD?

I didn't realized about the "Workshop" section, my bad.. so it will be nice if some admin move this topic for the correct section i suppose..

[codemonkeymike]

From what I know WASD is the only company doing "print on demand" keycaps. I would advise heavily against going with WASD, the key-caps are very thin ABS.

[saulo]

Nice to know mike, i found a company called "Signature Plastic", they have a very nice DSA keycap, i really like it! Do you know something about those guys? they have PBT sublimated

I spend more time defining the layout, keycaps and some features that i will put on the keyboard.

The Upper legend will be triggered with Shift key pressed, no matter the side.
The Bottom legend will be triggered with the Right Alt key pressed, no matter the side either.

The f toggles to front legend (i really don't know if it's possible to put it tought), if is a dark yellow key, the f key acts like a latch key (just perform 1 action).

I'm thinking to drill a small hole on capslock key to the internal LED lights up when the action is activated, i will test on a old keycap in the future ...

f + arrows change the keyboard layers.

The colors:

Dark Blue: BFB
Light Blue: BFH
Dark Yellow: YCJ
Light Yellow: YAF

I decided to design a dedicated controller board with a USB3 hub and a KLL based firmware. Since the keyboard is very compact and i want some USB type A connectors to mouse and memory stick on the keyboard, it's way better to have a second pcb.

[kbdfr]

Basically you can find your layout in a Tipro consisting of a staggered module with an added 4-column module
with just a few differences:

• 3 additional rows,
• 2 additional keys on the bottom row,
• 4 layers,
• every key freely programmable (even with complicated macros) using Tipro's freely available software
  (note that all double keys in the pic in fact consist of two separately programmable switches)

And as you can see in the pic below showing such a combination, you could even leave out and remove the additional module, use just the basic 16-column module and program a numeric pad into it.

Tipro staggered+32.jpg

Tipro staggered+32.jpg (91.76 KiB) Viewed 1871 times