Mechanical Keyboards

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Are you addicted to the clicking sounds of your beautiful and impressive mechanical keyboard?
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100% PCB as cheap as possible? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am going to build probably a few keyboards (like 3) for people to gift to. Since 100% PCB is not as popular as ergo boards, Im having a hard time finding any.

Do you have any 100% PCB (aliexpress or gerbers for printing in a PCB service like jlcpcb) that you prefer?

My goal is to make it as cheap as possible.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I built a 130% design. It cost about $75 delivered for five PCBs from JLCPCB. But I do it through-hole, so add:

Three resistors
Three LEDS
130 diodes
Encoder(all together, like $5 per board if you bought the diodes by the thousand)
MCU (I've been using the $6 nanoCH32V305, but your design may vary)
Caps and switches (not going there, way too personal taste)

You can also abuse their "aluminium PCB" service to generate a plate. It's not as stiff as a real laser-cut/waterjet-cut plate, but the price is right (like $80 for five; they add a penalty fee for asking for 130 big holes punched into the plate :D :P Then use a second plate as backing for a "sandwich style" mount.

Another alternative is some of the cheap hotswap kits on Aliexpress-- there's a 100% for about USD55 under the name "Monsgeek MG108W"; I can't speak of it for experience. I tried another similar but pricier one (SK108) a while back when I wanted a testing experience, and it worked well enough but the software for customization was awful