I live in Wandsworth, I’m a software engineer for my day job and I spend a lot of my spare time making electronics based stuff. A lot of that is IoT devices like wifi environment sensors and home automation bits and pieces but I have a bit of an obsession with making mechanical keyboards too (I think I’ve built about 12 so far and I have 2 in progress at the moment. The electronic bits are normally using dev boards and circuit python, I design the physical bits and enclosures myself (steadily getting better with fusion 360) and normally print them myself at home.
I’m interested in joining the makerspace for a couple of reasons; I want to start using different materials and cant really get a laser cutter or anything like that in the spare room. Primarily though I want to meet people who are interested in similar projects, I’d like to learn from people who have skills I’m interested in and help people out who want to learn about the things I know how to do. Looking forward to coming to an open day and seeing what sort of projects people are building and what sort of techniques they’re using.
i really appreciate reading that you primarily want to meet like-minded people.
i’ve met many wonderful people through the makerspace and i suspect you will too.
Great news: Currently, there is no watiting list for new members!
If you’re available this coming Wednesday, 19th October from 7pm to 9pm, you could come to our Open Evening and get a guided tour of the Makerspace and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions regarding membership.
Alternatively, Thursday nights is Electronics Night (usually from 7pm till late). You can just pop in without a specific project to work on, it is open to everyone, members and non-members alike. Great way to get a feel how things run and any member will be glad to give you an impromptu tour of the Space.
Lovely to meet you, I’ve always wanted to make a keyboard, just never found somewhere that would print the PCB for an amount I was willing to part with
As Julia says I am looking into making wooden Key Caps with the CNC, however I’m currently trying to source a <1 mm end mill to keep from breaking the bank
Haven’t seen that guy’s channel but it looks like he’s building some pretty nice ergo boards. I guess as far as my experience goes I’d say it’s just very addictive. If you have the kind of job where you spend all day using a keyboard you kinda get really intimate with the thing you built, which is really nice. I don’t think anything else I’ve built I’ve then gone on to spend 10 hours a day touching it and getting to know it. You can get really opinionated quickly on little things to do with the sound and feel, which then makes you want to optimise and try different things. If you’re comfortable with fairly fine soldering and have the patience to do the same fiddly fine things again and again (like solder 86 identical diodes, solder 172 identical sockets, solder 86 identical LEDs etc etc) then it’s quite a soothing way to spend some time, and if you then go on to spend a long time using it then it’s a really rewarding process.
All the ones I’ve built have either been split boards with 3d printed housings (my prusa i3 plate isn’t big enough for a full keeb) or using housings I’ve ordered online. That’s one of the reasons I wanna join the maker space, so I can cut some metal enclosures or mill them out of wood. I do have a wooden keyboard that feels really nice, but it’s an off the peg case and it has too much free space and so it sounds kinda hollow and not very nice. Milling my own would mean I could keep the free space to a minimum and use a much nicer piece of wood.
Programming them is trivial, mostly it’s a simple as flashing some open source software onto the board in the same way you would an arduino. If you’ve done some custom pcb stuff then you just need to set up matrices to tell it which rows and columns map to which keys. I’d be happy to help or show you some bits and pieces if you’re interested. I’m planning on gathering the bits to make a lily58 so maybe that’d be a good thing to do at the maker space.
Wooden keycaps would probably sound really nice, that’s definitely something I’d be interested in. Wooden cases are really nice too though and as I said in the prev post I’d really like to design and make my own. I’ve used OSH park for custom PCBs before and the’re very reasonably priced (IMO at least, I do tend to get a bit reckless with money when it comes to keyboard stuff) as long as you don’t mind ordering and forgetting about it for a while. Their boards are a cool purple colour as well which is nice. You can also get off the peg ones like these if you want a standard layout or snap apart hotswap things if you don’t want to do everything by hand.
I hadn’t seen the lily58. I love that the braces keys are in the middle. I’m terrible at hitting those keys with my little finger. I used to be a software engineer but only write code occasionally now for fun.
I’m somewhat tempted to learn a new keyboard layout but not sure I’m ready to make the commitment. You might find this video interesting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOaPb9wrgDY&ab_channel=adumb). He used AI to figure out optimal key layouts. I wondered how this would be different if you use lots of code samples in the training set.
I’m going to start going to electronic nights as I want to learn a little more about Arduino/Elegoo. If you pop by I’d love to hear more about your keyboard adventures.
