Ship
Pending review
- What did you make? I built Manul56HW, a mechanic handwired 56 key alice layout keyboard that is both ergonomic and good looking. It uses a custom 3D printed case, a 5x12 layout with a dedicated thumb cluster area, a rotary encoder, and flat XDA blank keycaps. The brain of this keyboard is powered by an STM32F411 Black Pill microcontroller running custom QMK firmware.
- What was challenging? Personally, the soldering part was nearly impossible for me since I didn’t have a quality soldering iron and because of this I burned myself around 3 times :/. Following this manually soldering every 56 switches with diode rows and column connections was tiring. While building this, I faced pin specific issues - I used the PB2 pin, which for some reason was specially used for something, and had to assign the column to a different pin. As well as this, I kind of rushed the case and made the USB-C hole too small and forgot supports and mounts for the plate, which will be fixed if I make a V2 in the future. Finally, setting up QMK. Although I drew a grid mentally, it still wasn’t enough to define the custom layers in one go.
- What are you proud of? Building a fully functional, input device completely from scratch with switches, some wire, and a bare microcontroller to flashing the firmware, I’m overall proud of every aspect in this project.
- What should people know so they can test your project? -Layout and profile: Since it uses a 5x12 alice layout with uniform XDA keycaps, it can take a while to get used to and can be a bit disorienting when constantly switching from a normal layout to this layout.
-PLEASE use a data-capable USB-C cable. I first made this mistake and thought my microcontroller was faulty. Just having a data-capable USB-C cable would’ve been a life saver.
- 3 devlogs
- 7h build
