Unicode Key Labels for X-Keys Input Devices

thingiverse

Quick background: I sell magazines on eBay and sell just enough Spanish-language ones that I was looking for an easy way to enter Unicode characters such as accented vowels and "ñ"s. After trying a few on-screen keyboards and even an Android app on my tablet, I finally gave in and bought an X-Keys, which is a fully-programmable secondary keyboard. It has the facility to print labels, but I thought it'd be nice to 3D print labels so that the light shines through the character, like my gaming keyboard does. Had to do some trial and error with this and finally got the top row containing accented vowels and Ñ. Tried a couple times to get the last two keys (¿ & ¡), but since they share the key with a shift-layer character it was beyond my printer's limits to cram so much in such a tiny space. I'll most likely upload the other rows as I make them. I have all the grave accents and some of the other lesser-used characters too, in addition to a hexadecimal pad (yeah I like to program too) and some arrow keys, and some macros to automate some of my eBay listings. If it helps anyone and you want to reproduce what I did to suit your own purposes, here's the process I used in 123D Design: Create a box 13.5x13.5x0.25 Create text and extrude Drag text to the top of the box and sink it through Subtract the extruded text from the box Remember this needs to be in one piece, so things like As or Os will need a connector somewhere, so just add a box primitive. I started with 2x2x0.25 and pushed/pulled a side as needed to make the bridge. If you had to add a connector, be sure to combine all. Export to STL.