
Building a Keyboard - flapjack
http://blog.fsck.com/2012/12/building-a-keyboard-part-1.html
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ChuckMcM
I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun
than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a
keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on
Upverter.

I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better
two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row"
position. Then touch type text that appears on a screen in front of you while
the iPads are busily figuring out how far your fingers are moving and 'tuning'
where the other keys should be done. Once you've done like 50 words error free
it beeps and send that off. Shapeways makes the cover, Albert PCB makes a
circuit board, and you order key switches and diodes from a distributor. Boom
a custom keyboard designed by you for you.

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meaty
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses
down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover
and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which
are a bastard to code.

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obrajesse
The cool thing about the modern world is that incredibly talented people have
already written decent opensource keyboard firmware. But I'll get to that in
Part 2 of the writeup :)

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meaty
Excellent. I look forward to reading about that :)

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obrajesse
It's up :) Also at blog.fsck.com

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lytfyre
I've been keeping an eye on the ergodox, but was probably going to go with a
kinesis. You've tempted me about the fun of building one myself instead.

Could you ballpark what the cost to build one would be?(ignoring tools like
the soldering iron?)

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obrajesse
Right. I'd meant to write up the pricing.

Keys - $0.80 x 78 Diodes - $2-$3 3D printed shells - $240 from Shapeways.
Cheaper from a friend with a makerbot Keycaps - Cheapest when harvested from a
board found at goodwill. Otherwise, $35 or so from WASD Teensy++ - $24

I'll leave the "priceless" joke to the peanut gallery.

