Keyboard

Original idea was spawned when going through the scrap bin in the laser cutting room. I found a slab of quarter inch thick acrylic and had a dream to be able to have a keyboard that, instead of the normal RGB under the keys, had an underglow. I got to work designing a keyboard that would fit inside the size acrylic I had and I settled onto 10 keyless design that I could laser cut out of a combination of birch wood and the acrylic.

The Case

Designed in Fusion360, the case was designed with the dimensions of the acrylic in mind. The walls are reletively thin for a keyboard but the height is much greater then most standard keyboards. Because of the thickness of the acrylic and the undesigned PCB depth, this ended up being too large of a safety margin, however, it does make the underglow look very good.

The PCB

After assembling the case I had the PCB printed with the help of LFKeyboards.

Soldering

Then I selected the keys that I wanted and began to hand solder the PCB including all 107 keys. Each key was 5 solder joints, each LED in each of the keys was 2 and thats not even counting the numerous other components soldered to the back of the keyboard. In total there were more then 1000 solder joints done by hand over a 7 hours period. I did it straight only stopping for 15 minutes to eat in the middle. This, is unadvisable. Despite eye protection and vent use, I developed a smokers ptergyeum, a growth on my eye, caused by the prolonged exposure to burning flux.

Testing

After installing the frimware, QMK, the keyboard was ready to be tested. Each key had to be individually tested to ensure the controller and the other hardware was working. After that was done, I could move on to testing each LED and ensure that the RGB underglow was working.

Final Product

After confiming all the keys work and the backlight and underglow work I was able to install the keycaps and call it complete. This project was an intense crash course in soldering. I recomend to anynone who is interested in learning to solder to pursue a project that provides the repetition required to learn soldering.