this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Mechanical Keyboards
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Unless you have the tooling and knowledge to manufacture precision parts like swiches and stabilizers, and integrated electronics like a microcontroller, it would be very hard to 100% DIY a keyboard.
The most DIY I've ever did was to design, 3D print, handwire, build and program a split ergo keyboard based around a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller and Kailh Box Jade switches.
An intermediate but still very interesting route would be picking matching parts from vendors like kbdfans or kprepublic, with your choice of enclosure, PCB, switches and stabs, lots of soldering and testing, and some QMK fun to round it off.
If i was to follow that intermediate road, what are the caveats I should avoid? I tried looking for a website like PCPartPicker, unfortunately it doesn't seem to exist And I'm afraid of picking up different pieces that will end up not being compatible with one another
PCB, top plate and case need to be compatible, so you need to pick ones made for each other, usually from the same vendor.
99% of the PCBs and plates out there are MX compatible, so you can consider switches, stabs and keycaps universal.
Thank you ! Could you point me in the direction of one you would recommend, if you know any? Do you advise against some of them?
I've built two XD64s from kprepublic, one with Box Jades for home and one with Boba U4s for work, because they perfectly fitted my use case: flashable with QMK, ISO layout compatible, bottom layout flexible enough to fit an arrow keys cluster despite being 60%. They're very good.
I don't have any experience with other vendors.
Sorry to necro this thread a bit, but I saw your comment and wanted to recommend a site I recently found that’s exactly like PCPartPicker for keyboards: https://keyboardpartpicker.com/
I haven’t used it myself much, but it seems like exactly what you need.