Mechanical Keyboards

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100% PCB as cheap as possible? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months 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] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Price is heavily dependent on how many PCBs of the same type you want printed and if you need assembly or are planning on it doing it yourself and will be sourcing the components from the cheapest possible suppliers.

Shipping from the Asian shops also has to be factored in, any sort of rush printing or shipping gets very expensive.

Ive paid £40 each for a run of three 40% PCBs fully assembled/tested and with priority shipping that was less than a week. This isn't actually that bad when you compare to a similar sized PCB from a store in the US for me in the UK when adding on the shipping and potential customs fees.

Cheapest possible will be the free PCB option from PCBWay, but you will need to do some work to get that money back from them https://www.pcbway.com/free_pcb.aspx

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeeah, I figured 100% PCB is pretty expensive. I want to do the minimum 5 amount, non-assembled PCB.

My main issue is not selecting the PCB service, I primarily need PCB gerber files for 100% keyboards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

There are loads available that are open sourced, for example: https://github.com/help-14/mechanical-keyboard

Some even have the full guide for ordering: https://github.com/bluepylons/Boston/tree/main/Boston%20-%20Current%20design/3D%20printed%20version

Is there not one there that you like? Seems to cover most of the full sized layouts I've seen.