ncix says shipped my shit
but just created a label
fucking linus looking motherfuckers
cant trust no one

I've heard others mention that NCIX US was slow to ship. But no other complaints regarding NCIX US.

Thinking about making my own mechanical keyboard. Just can't think of a good way to bring the price down unless I use prototype board instead of manufacturing a PCB for it. Using a protoboard will allow me to one off the keyboard but I would have to create all the traces and stuff my hand via solder trails and direct connection of wires.

Basically the general size for a 120 key keyboard is about 45cm by 15cm, you can do a 60% for around 30cm x 10cm or something. Either way PCB's will be expensive unless I find a better company. The one I use will give me 5 or so for 140$.

Next is switches... if I do cherry switches price will skyrocket so I have to look for china clones. Probably Gateron or kailth (or what ever it's called) as you can get packages of 120 for about 25-35$. If I buy the 5 pack minimum for PCB's I would need at least 5 sets of these so there's another 175$.

Next is the cases. I have some milling machines and other stuff I can use to make bent aluminum cases but I don't own anything that can do square punches so it might be a bit difficult to do a single bent plate design for the case with floating keys.

Lastly is the actual micro controllers. I would need to source something that can do programming over USB or buy two different chips, one for USB communication and one for the basic processing itself. There's the teensy 3.1 for like 20-30$ but I can probably source individual parts cheaper than that (probably for free if I get samples from the manufacturers).

Over all if I do this not as a one off project and do it right it will cost me about 410-460$ for 5 keyboards... which is a fucking lot. Even if I were to sell them it would be at around 80-90$ to break even and at that point you might as well buy premade keyboards.

Decisions decisions...

ah man been thinking this too,

http://techkeys.us/collections/accessories/products/the-enabler

with a teensy and switches,

next week be cutting some aluminum will have some scrap leftover but its going to be 3/8's thick

you can get switches cheap if you grab broken boards or find cheap boards to desolder

This post was edited by yupitsmeh on Feb 25 2015 06:51pm

That's actually a decent idea. I could cut lots of PCB cost if I fab the different sizes with snap lines on it, but assembly would be a bitch since you would need many screws or some sort of custom holding device to secure the PCB's. That is in contrast to only needing 2-4 screws to hold a single PCB into place.

As if I didn't do this already... because you know.. I've only posted my custom fabbed PCB's before on here.

just to get a prototype going thats what I was thinking before going all out on some pcbs

rating 6.7/10.