After a couple of sleepless nights, I decided to get my hands dirty with this sweet and diverse world of mechanical keyboards. As i understood on my way to my current daily driver it's quite interesting challenge. My main idea was to make a cheap keyboard, that can guide me forward in this hobby.
So, i made a rough sketch of the location of my fingers to understand how far i must go with ergogen and then use spacing of switches in KiCad to make a PCB. Also this isn't a bad idea to play around with encoders and small OLED display in my project. As it usually almost everytime happens with first try, i made some mistakes ( learned some lessons :D ) and realize this after i got PCBs from manufacturer. It's not critical, but in some points it could be just unexpectable for those, who would repeat my project.
By the way here is PCBs appearance:
WPM and remix of bongo cat animation is showing on my OLED (of course with picture of my cat instead of original one!). With encoders i can scroll my feed, and also fast forward/backward the YouTube videos by 5 seconds. Encoders is very interesting feature in keyboards and detailed explanation of this you can check in QMK Docs.
important note: in first version of my schematics, unfortunately, encoders works not so stable as expected... sometimes for correct working keyboard must be rebooted.
My keyboard has a 42 keys, and it planned to use with QWERTY layout. For me is also iportant to have access to ukrainian letter Ґ, Ї, and some umlaut letters Ä, Ö, Ü. I have now a laptop with QWERTZ layout, so have a keyboard with comfortable QWERTY is must have for me. So here is the keymap:
In file 'path_for400x300.svg' in this repo you can find a complete graphical outline for lasercutted case. I used a 3 mm acrylic sheet and laser in local FabLab.
I created a fork of QMK firmware here and here is tknbrd0 is located inside of QMK fork.
So you can compile firmware from fork or you can find binaries in 'FW' directory of this repo.
- Footprint for OLED is mirrored, so i use wires and simple pair of acrylic pieces to hold it with glue (really not a clearest design decision, but it just a first experience, so when it works it works).
- Case: it's very important to solder RPI Pico a bit higher that it could be to prevent collision with acrylic case!!!
- Encoders may have strange behaviour because they are connected to one pin. it was a bad decision and when reset keyboard isn't working i just rotate them together for first and then separately, so after this magical manipulation they works as usual.
Interactive BOM could be handy in assembling process and you can find it here
| Designator | Footprint | Quantity | Value | LCSC Part # |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D1 - D42 | Diode_SOD-123 | 42 | Diode | C83528 |
| EXSW1, EXSW2 | RotaryEncoder_Alps_EC11E-Switch_Vertical_H20mm_CircularMountingHoles | 2 | RotaryEncoder_Switch | C1322543 |
| J1 | OLED_128x64 (I2C version) | 1 | Conn_01x04 | |
| S1 - S42 | MX_PCB_1.00u | 42 | Keyswitch | |
| U1 | Raspberry_Pi_Pico | 1 | Raspberry_Pi_Pico | |
| rD1 | D_SOD-523 | 1 | 1N4148WT | C232841 |
| rLED1 - rLED42 | YS-SK6812MINI-E-withCUTOUT | 42 | YS-SK6812MINI-E | C5149201 |
| aluminum spacer M2(standoff) | MountingHole_4.3mm_M4_ISO14580 | 8 | standoff |
Lasercutting, Knob, Switches all this you can easily find on market on your personal preferences. All that included in BOM is recommended, only LED is optional.