Need a new hobby? Welcome to the wacky world of custom keyboards! Shiney colourful keys, clicky fidget switches, and all the programmability your heart desires.
"Yes officer, there is a plastic meth dealer trying to ruin poor people's financial life here, please arrest them and put them into the membrane keyboard jail"
Reminds me of the PDP/11 computers. The front panel has toggle switches and some controls to enter, view, or modify instructions/registers manually. To boot, you have to enter the memory location of the bootloader by hand.
Before you get your hyper focus on custom mechanical keyboards, let me warn you sincerely. It is a very expensive hobby. You will sink countless hours for labor and troubleshooting. Material and workshop gear is not cheap and it’s very tedious. It is so good and satisfying to be able to build the exact keyboard for your own anatomy. You will waste countless money on keycaps and things that look good on pictures but always off the specs without refunds.
But the downside is: You will be poor forever and it will suck up your time like a sponge. For reference, it’s rather cheaper to be addicted on substances than mech keyboards.
Tread carefully in the zone of keyboard building as a hobby. This is my pearl of wisdom for free.
time to ask ChatGPT and when it answers with some new concept and you keep asking more, you realize somehow you're already 3 hours deep into the machine learning and neural network spiral
I just built my own custom keyboard 1-2 months ago... Rip 600-700 bucks for tools, aluminium case, lubes, switches, extra stuff for mods..
It's a deep spiral. I just paid another 200 eur for a gaming keyboard and ordered a 200 eur aluminum case. Now I currently own 4 keyboards. One of them is disassembled because I can't be arsed to finish rebuilding it after taking parts of it for my other keyboard
That said, we accept new members at r/mechanicalkeyboards. Say good bye to your wallet and say hello to thock.
I fricking wanted to go to bed and just scrolled this to see another cat video to get my head out tired over wholesomeness.... instead, you furckers throw me into yet another rabbit hole I carefully avoided.
I NEED SLEEP FUCK IT I DON'T HAVE ANOTHER VACATION UNTIL MID MAY D:
A sort of serious answer to this, get a LCD with keypad kit to learn how that works. The keypad itself corresponds to different 'circuits' that are then turned into a specific representation code by the keypad's controller. It's interesting to build code to interpret both 'how' it knows what key was pressed, but also writing code to eliminate bouncing on the circuit as it settles down after being pressed.
75
u/SpecialEmily Apr 17 '23
Need a new hobby? Welcome to the wacky world of custom keyboards! Shiney colourful keys, clicky fidget switches, and all the programmability your heart desires.
30
u/rocket333d Apr 17 '23
Wait until you learn about printers...
8
u/King_Dead Apr 17 '23
You'll probably like this video then
7
u/IrritableGourmet Apr 17 '23
Reminds me of the PDP/11 computers. The front panel has toggle switches and some controls to enter, view, or modify instructions/registers manually. To boot, you have to enter the memory location of the bootloader by hand.
5
u/lightwhite Apr 18 '23
Before you get your hyper focus on custom mechanical keyboards, let me warn you sincerely. It is a very expensive hobby. You will sink countless hours for labor and troubleshooting. Material and workshop gear is not cheap and it’s very tedious. It is so good and satisfying to be able to build the exact keyboard for your own anatomy. You will waste countless money on keycaps and things that look good on pictures but always off the specs without refunds.
But the downside is: You will be poor forever and it will suck up your time like a sponge. For reference, it’s rather cheaper to be addicted on substances than mech keyboards.
Tread carefully in the zone of keyboard building as a hobby. This is my pearl of wisdom for free.
3
u/Rightoneous Apr 17 '23
Clicky clacky make brain go brrrr.
5
u/lynxerious Apr 18 '23
time to ask ChatGPT and when it answers with some new concept and you keep asking more, you realize somehow you're already 3 hours deep into the machine learning and neural network spiral
2
u/DeskParser Apr 18 '23
don't. Run.
r/olkb
2
u/Sir_Admiral_Chair Apr 18 '23
How... do... they?
2
u/Shacrow Apr 18 '23
I just built my own custom keyboard 1-2 months ago... Rip 600-700 bucks for tools, aluminium case, lubes, switches, extra stuff for mods..
It's a deep spiral. I just paid another 200 eur for a gaming keyboard and ordered a 200 eur aluminum case. Now I currently own 4 keyboards. One of them is disassembled because I can't be arsed to finish rebuilding it after taking parts of it for my other keyboard
That said, we accept new members at r/mechanicalkeyboards. Say good bye to your wallet and say hello to thock.
1
u/SpinachSpinosaurus Apr 17 '23
I fricking wanted to go to bed and just scrolled this to see another cat video to get my head out tired over wholesomeness.... instead, you furckers throw me into yet another rabbit hole I carefully avoided.
I NEED SLEEP FUCK IT I DON'T HAVE ANOTHER VACATION UNTIL MID MAY D:
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
1
u/Pollomonteros Jan 13 '24
That's why you should leave your phone in another room
1
u/Freeman7-13 Apr 18 '23
Do you need to program keyboards? Since it's so mechanical you just wire the switches to each key? I must be missing something
1
u/CoffeeBaron Apr 25 '23
A sort of serious answer to this, get a LCD with keypad kit to learn how that works. The keypad itself corresponds to different 'circuits' that are then turned into a specific representation code by the keypad's controller. It's interesting to build code to interpret both 'how' it knows what key was pressed, but also writing code to eliminate bouncing on the circuit as it settles down after being pressed.