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Manul56HW

Hardware

By @Tuguldur

  • 3 Devlogs
  • 7 Total hours

A hand-wired mechanical keyboard that's basically a fork of the Pteron56 keyboard with a little mods. Instead of using laser cut acrylic like the Pteron56, the Manul56HW uses PETG, in a sandwich-like fashion. This is also meant to be a super affordable keyboard build, so I bought a pack of 120 factory defective random keyboard switches for just 2$, fixed them, and used them. The main features of this keyboard include: A KY-040 rotary encoder, a 56 key ergonomic non-split design, a Black Pill STM32F411CEU6 microcontroller - which features native type C support

Source
Ship #1 Pending review

@Tuguldur on Manul56HW

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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
Video of Project → See source code →
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@Tuguldur on Manul56HW

2h 33m 49s logged

I finally finished handwiring and tested out the keyboard! I flashed the firmware onto the Blackpill using QMK, made a pretty basic layout which I plan to change in the next update, and tested every key. Turns out you can’t use the pin B2 on this since it’s reserved for something special or something, so I had to change it to A7 in order to fix it. Overall, I think I finished this project now.

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@Tuguldur on Manul56HW

4h 2m 14s logged

I did the columns and rows and added diodes to the keyboard!
…Wait, I just realized the thumb cluster is entirely wrong and could short circuit the entire board when pressed? I should’ve thought before soldering…

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@Tuguldur on Manul56HW

53m logged

Today I assembled the case & plate and put in the components. The case was printed in transparent (its not actually transparent :/ ) PETG in 4 pieces which I glued together with superglue. Some of the holes were a bit too small so I did have to sand them down to make the switches fit. One thing I should probably note for future projects like this is to some support near the middle of the plate or else when you press on a key the plate flexes a little. However, I am happy with today’s results and I can finally move onto hand wiring it!

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