Tenkeyless Keyboard - Plate Mount - Hand Wired

thingiverse

Human: I was inspired by the SiCK-68 but wanted a tenkeyless layout so I designed it from scratch. Here are some other features I added in my design: * The case holds the plate at a slight incline * Threaded inserts are used for the case-closing screws * A provision is made for 4 eight-neopixel strips inside, providing some mood lighting but not yet installed I used zero top and bottom layers for the top parts hoping to allow LEDs to shine through better. The infill is a three-millimeter grid which seems fine for strength as the top/plate doesn't deflect appreciably when typing normally. If you follow my recommended wiring plan, twenty I/O pins will be needed for the matrix; a simpler plan would use twenty-three pins but that was more than available on the controller I wanted to use. The Adafruit ItsyBitsy nRF52840 uses twenty pins which leaves one free for driving NeoPixels. I chose KMKfw, a Python-based keyboard firmware, and hope to enable BLE HID in the future. Recommended construction order: * Pin and glue top half together * Install keyswitches & keycaps * Solder row wiring with diodes * Solder column wiring * Wiring runs between the half-columns * Pin and glue bottom half together * Wiring runs to microcontroller If you use my recommended wiring plan, the half-row between numbers and F-keys is a good place to route column wires between the two sides. Pay attention to the wiring in the Page Up/Down area as it deviates from the general pattern. I also feel there's a deviation from what the svg/pdf shows and the actual wiring; the attached tkl.py file for kmk is of course for my actual wiring. The OpenSCAD files are a bit of a mess, but you can use this as a starting point for other keyboard layout designs. However, if I had to do it again, I'd probably use kad to create svg files for the plate and bring them into my 3d CAD workflow. The prints are quite large at around two hundred by one forty and there are four big prints in total plus five pins. I ended up not using clips to retain the Itsy Bitsy microcontroller because they interfered with the pins. Instead, I just used double-sided tape. This part of the design could use refinement.