kiBoard
Hardware- 2 Devlogs
- 1 Total hours
A full 104 key keyboard with extra programmable keys and the F13-F25 keys
Ship #1
Pending review
Now theres an enclosure! I think messing around with blender has helped me a little bit with fusion, its slanted a bit towards the user so it wont be as difficult to use
This is a bit of a long devlog as most of the project was recorded through lapse but was not notified of a systems interruption prior to recording so that time is unavailable (~8 hours). So Ive gotten most of the keyboard completed aside from some things like BOM and other things and I think its coming together pretty nicely. I started out by drafting a layout for something that I would feel comfortable using in an online keyboard editor that I had previously used for another hackpad project. After that I had to research the type of sbcs I could use as the XIAO RP2040 is a nice inexpensive board it did not have enough IO pins for the amount of keys I had used in the project, so I switched to a Pi Pico (Which unfortunately also did not have enough pins required to wire everything together) And I was trying to avoid using an IO expander; someone on a huddle introduced me to a technique where instead of wiring a key matrix of one row and column per row/columns, you double the rows and halve the columns to try to achieve a lower pinout count to hookup to the SBC you use, which worked to an extent but ultimately I had to learn how to use an IO expander which someone else had helped me with props to the people on the huddle. After this I had to get everything into kiCad and I tried out a couple different plugins to help with wiring since there was a LOT of keys but none of them completely helped so in the end I had to wire about half the board to clear the about ~1000 errors (something that half occured from the plugins, half from me using the wrong footprint in the final pcb. In total there is about 158 keys on this keyboard with the main standouts being an extra macropad on the left side as well as an extra function row (“Im gonna press the F25 key”) All I have left to do is make the case, set up the repository correctly and do the gerbers and this will be ready to ship!
