openmic.social is an uncensored community. You may encounter strong language, controversial opinions, and mature or NSFW material. You must be 18+ to browse. Illegal content is prohibited and removed on sight — please report it. By continuing, you accept that you may see content you personally disagree with.
I’ve made a bunch of completely custom mechanical keyboards with my 3D prinnter and laser engraver, a few with PCBs that hold a Microcontroller dev board like a Pi Pico or Arduino, but for more of them, I hand-wired the switches directly to the microcontroller. My biggest and smallest.
Hey, got any pointers for someone looking to do the same? I’m just now getting into serious soldering and really want to make the prefect keyboard for me.
For handwiring, Joe Scotto’s videos on Youtube are excellent. For something a little more old school, but maybe more accessible theoretically, Matt3o’s walkthrough from the before-COVID times is still viable.
If you want to design a PCB, KiCAD is quite usable now, and there are plugins for keyboard switch footprints and to take Keyboard Layout Editor data and place them perfectly. For me, with no EE background whatsoever, the biggest mental hurdle was understanding the design paradigm “electrical schematic first, physical layout next”. I’ve been content to leave my PCB level at the point of making the entire keyboard PCB dumb and leaving the brains of the thing to a cheap and replaceable Raspberry Pi Pico (I like the clones that use USB-C). Physically, they’re basically larger versions of this tutorial from adafruit, though I use more standard keyboard firmwares. The other benefit of a PCB is that the minimum order most places is five, so with a couple of design choices (e.g. include mounting holes and rounded corners) and some PCB standoffs, you can have two usable builds with no case at all, and a spare PCB.
How hard do you think it would be to make a custom oversized keyboard PCB? I have real thick fingers, a 3d printer, and zero electronics experience.
Electronics wise, this is absolutely an intro project if you do the PCBs how I did and leave a space to mount a Raspberry Pi Pico or similar. Then your PCB is basically structural support for some wiring and diodes, and all the actual electrical engineering is contained in a $5 dev board.
Generally the skills you need are a bit broad, but not deep at all, which suits my flighty mindset perfectly. A bit of investigating keyboard design rabbit holes (there are a surprising number of robust web tools for getting the alignment stuff for the keys), a bit of 3D printing, including assembling builds that are bigger than a build plate, a bit of CAD, a bit of PCB design (but again, ONLY a bit… there are pre-designed layout footprints for the microcontroller boards and for keyboard switches), and a bit of soldering, but generally of big and robust through-hole contacts that are hard to completely destroy.
I’m curious as to which part would be oversized? The number of keys? The spacing between them? The keycaps themselves? Any one of them would complicate things in its own way, but not ridiculously so, and potentially pretty trivially. If you’re interested in following it up, making a macro-pad or numpad is a common first project, since the concepts are identical and the end result is still useful, but the investment and commitment are low if you screw it up or decide not to move on to anything bigger.
Spacing and keycaps. Literally just scale up a keyboard like 20-25%. I make a lot of typos touching adjacent keys with my Shrek-fingers.
Well, keycaps potentially got added to the list of things to design, but otherwise the basics are the same. There would just be an adjustment to the 2-D “plate” files you’d need to use, and you’d run into the complications from a printer build plate sooner (depending on printer and keyboard size). You might not need to go a full 20-25% though. Just 5 or 10 might be enough and then you could maybe still get away with “normal” keycaps. Different shape families of keycaps have different names, and the XDA (sold by every random reseller on Amazon) or ISA (made for one specifix brand, XVX) both have pretty large top surfaces that would help with making your fingertips comfortable and blunting the aesthetic hit of altering a dimension we’re subtly used to.