Mechanical Keyboards @lemmy.ml Bondrewd @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

100% PCB as cheap as possible?

I am going to build probably a few keyboards (like 3) for people to gift to. Since 100% PCB is not as popular as ergo boards, Im having a hard time finding any.

Do you have any 100% PCB (aliexpress or gerbers for printing in a PCB service like jlcpcb) that you prefer?

My goal is to make it as cheap as possible.

4 comments

Price is heavily dependent on how many PCBs of the same type you want printed and if you need assembly or are planning on it doing it yourself and will be sourcing the components from the cheapest possible suppliers.

Shipping from the Asian shops also has to be factored in, any sort of rush printing or shipping gets very expensive.

Ive paid £40 each for a run of three 40% PCBs fully assembled/tested and with priority shipping that was less than a week. This isn't actually that bad when you compare to a similar sized PCB from a store in the US for me in the UK when adding on the shipping and potential customs fees.

Cheapest possible will be the free PCB option from PCBWay, but you will need to do some work to get that money back from them https://www.pcbway.com/free_pcb.aspx
- Yeeah, I figured 100% PCB is pretty expensive. I want to do the minimum 5 amount, non-assembled PCB.
  
  My main issue is not selecting the PCB service, I primarily need PCB gerber files for 100% keyboards.
  
  There are loads available that are open sourced, for example: https://github.com/help-14/mechanical-keyboard
  
  Some even have the full guide for ordering: https://github.com/bluepylons/Boston/tree/main/Boston - Current design/3D printed version
  
  Is there not one there that you like? Seems to cover most of the full sized layouts I've seen.
I built a 130% design. It cost about $75 delivered for five PCBs from JLCPCB. But I do it through-hole, so add:

Three resistors

Three LEDS

130 diodes

Encoder(all together, like $5 per board if you bought the diodes by the thousand)

MCU (I've been using the $6 nanoCH32V305, but your design may vary)

Caps and switches (not going there, way too personal taste)

You can also abuse their "aluminium PCB" service to generate a plate. It's not as stiff as a real laser-cut/waterjet-cut plate, but the price is right (like $80 for five; they add a penalty fee for asking for 130 big holes punched into the plate :D :P Then use a second plate as backing for a "sandwich style" mount.

Another alternative is some of the cheap hotswap kits on Aliexpress-- there's a 100% for about USD55 under the name "Monsgeek MG108W"; I can't speak of it for experience. I tried another similar but pricier one (SK108) a while back when I wanted a testing experience, and it worked well enough but the software for customization was awful