Hot damn. Got my 280 working with the only possible PCB replacement on the market. The Eon87 from HMKB.
So glad to have this fixed. Noxary story is not a good one, but the keyboard might outclass my Jane as far as feel and style. Definitely a top 10 keyboard of all time.
And it’s one of the only keyboards I have that I use without a wrist rest. Very low front profile.
Need to get a red plate for that beast! A local guy here in pgh. had a suave blue 280 with a bright red plate & it looked so good! Not a combo I would’ve thought worked so well, but it does!
This one has a 5mm PC plate. I think it’s one of the things that makes it sound so good. I have a few of his 60% 5mm PC plates as well. They are awesome for hotswap, and make tray mounts sound so much better. It’s also easier than using plate foam and a plate.
I remember missing out on Noxary 5mm 60% PC plate. Expected them to offer it now and then. Nope.
Looks like Ponoko will cut .19" (4.826 mm) POM plate (black and white) and SendCutSend will do 6.8mm POM.
edit: correction, they don’t offer 4.8mm Green POM
Ideally you want the undercut on the switch openening as well, so the switches actually snap into place. I think the Noxary plates are milled for this reason. I don’t know how you could laser cut that.
I’m not sure that a laser can do that at all, if you want to leave a 1.2-1.5mm lip for the switch to click into. Varying depths would be a machining operation. If the kerf is fairly tight, the friction fit should hold, and you can either let the clip be compressed or, if you want to be kind to the switches, have an arc or rectangle in the north side of the switch. If someone does want a proper lip, I think the more common technique, in acrylic cutting at least, is to have a 1.5mm sheet with the “correct” hole size, and have the remaining depth cut a bit oversize.
Maybe with some softer materials, having the undercut for the switch to latch into might not be necessary? Imagine a very thick plate made from some sort of softer wood (like pine or balsa) or stiffer foam material. Thick enough that this “plate” just rests directly against the PCB, provided that the case could accommodate this.
Did some more work on my keybird42 case design. Sharp corners have been banished!
I made some happy discoveries:
I made the brow a bit higher so there is plenty of clearance for the USB daughterboard; the case is now 6.66 key units deep, even more numerological amusement. With the extra space I thought a wider pen rest might look good.
By accident the pen rest was close to 4x the size of a side panel, so I made it exactly 4x the size. This will let me mix and match accent colour pieces. (It doesn’t look like exactly 4x in the diagram below because there’s extra clearance for the laser cutter.)
Purple board for me too, but nothing so diy as the above (looks awesome btw). I’m building my Mercutio. First one and third THT kit and MechWild kit. It boots and shows the logo on the OLED, so I’m happy! …especially after mistakes were made and fixed with the OLED. Diode array next and then maybe Mill-Maxing this one.
Spent way too long building this today. lol. Messed up every step along the way. And the thing is, I’ve built one before! lol. Too proud to read the build guide gets you lost time. But it’s done and me likey.
Saturn60 on raw steel. Gateron smoothie switches. SA Terminal keycaps.
And yes it’s got matching green LEDs that shine out the side holes. 
Also, Does anyone have more information about these keycaps? I bought them a bit ago on the aftermarket. I believe they were a Chinese group buy, but I can’t find any information about them. I was told they are from Signature Plastics, and the molds appear to confirm, but that’s all I really know. I don’t see them on the Matrix keycap info page.
Was this from one of the small 7-Bit keycap group buys? Each of the rounds was a different color way and I can never keep them straight. I think there were 6 or 7 rounds.
Dunno. I only remember gray, white, black, red, and violet.
DJ Khaled: ANOTHER ONE
Built another HMKB, this time in cream/beige with HMX swift switches. GMK Taiga. Top photo here is most color accurate
Almost all of the links I can find seem to be from some Maineiac selling it (assuming that’s where you purchased it)?
I’m sure there’s more on Chinese language web but the top image link seems to be a layout page someone posted to ZFrontier a few years ago. Unfortunately the designer/ GB runner didn’t put a logo on there like Jack Studio usually does.
I love SA and China seems to be where all of the action is these days. That goes back a while I guess, first time I saw SA Song I knew I was missing out on the fun. Checking Matrix for the first time in a while it appears there are a bunch of sets I never saw.
Also unfortunately SP doesn’t update their gallery wall anymore. I think the most recent set on the site is 2019.
So, I guess technically it doesn’t count as “workbench” yet, but I’m starting on my next cheap handwire board. I want to revisit DIY keycap legends, and I have my new jig ready to test with some blank white XDA (quite cheap in sets of 104), but it has been colder than a well-digger’s ass in the Klondike here in Texas, or else almost that cold but also raining. I don’t laser in the house, so I haven’t lasered at all.
I am pretty sure I’m going for a no-stabilizers mini-1800 that doesn’t need a special keycap set beyond being unsculpted. I have been eating my own dog food for several weeks now with a couple of my boards, so I’m trying to learn what I actually like from that. I’m trying to design around the fact that I will likely never adjust to a split LShift, but I hate tuning and lubing stabs, AND I also like my boards, weird as they are, to bear some gentle nods in the direction of sanity. I have found that a split space with smaller keys is really not an issue, as I mostly land where I want with my thumb, the profile is not uncomfortable, and the debounce in KMK is good enough that an occasional slip doesn’t seem to trigger double presses. HERE is my first crack at a layout. I think it will be okay for simple data entry, but I’m struggling a bit with what to do with the dash and the equal/plus buttons. I suuuuupooooose I could just put the numrow on the top, but then we’re looking more at a slightly squished 65%, and that just seems less fun.
The plan for now is to do the plate in hardboard and 3D print a case in 2-4 pieces to go around it. Some of the techniques from my last build could be useful if refined a bit.
Switches will need to be generic red, harvested from a hotswap board, or… sigh… purchased.
That looks so good. I love that keycap set. I saw someone has extras available (I think it was novelkeys) but I can’t justify getting another keycap set right now… well, I can. Wife can’t.
Digital workbench;
After getting the GMK Standard Plastic Colors kit in the mail, I decided I loved the keys but wanted a better way to display them than the adequately cromulent packaging it came in. Having recently designed some simple testers using signage standoffs as legs, this seemed a natural option. Wall art!
It’ll probably be a few weeks before I get some more material and time with the laser, but here’s a basic mockup:
Anybody else think they might want one?
I really like this ideal! I’d be down to buy one off you if you make multiple of these.
I added keycaps to my keybird42 model.
They are based on matt3o’s OPK adapted from CadQuery to build123d. I have omitted the underside features, and the legends are added after the keycaps are laid out, instead of using OPK’s code to add the legend when the keycap is generated. I configured OPK to use an eyeballed vaguely MTNU-ish profile, with my own guess at what R0 and R5 might look like.
The legends are Marcin Wichary’s Gorton Perfected, which I acquired with his book Shift Happens.
The construction time for this model is appalingly slow. It takes about 2 minutes for my Python script to run; the keycap legends take about a second each. Then CQ-editor takes another minute and a half to draw the picture. Bah.
On a more positive note, rev 2 of the PCBs spent today travelling via Guangzhou, Delhi, Dubai, Roissy, and Stansted. There will be soldering in my near future.
