I’m also curious about the laser engraving process! What are the keycaps made out of, and what settings/type of laser did you use on them? This isn’t something anyone has used our laser for, and I’d like to recommend it to my patrons.
I am not quite sure I’d be ready to recommend it, but your more adventurous patrons may want to experiment. These keycaps are PBT, a cousin of polyester. They are not particularly pleasant smelling when heated or especially when burned, but they’re not as unhealthy as ABS (the other common plastic for keycaps) and certainly not as bad as the straight up poison gas that comes from PVC. I use a basic 5W blue diode laser, coat the keycap with an “infusible ink” pen from Cricut (most of their infusible products are polyester-based), put it in an alignment jig, then laser a raster image “low and slow.” My particular laser seems to do best when I do two or three passes at 2% power and 45mm/minute. The idea is to heat it roughly in line with the crafting heat presses without letting the heat spread and color in areas beyond the beam. I experimented with actually burning or engraving, and that sort of works, but (1) it’s stinky, and (2) the ash wipes away and you’re left with a mostly colorless letter-shaped indentation. The “dye sub” technique produces barely any fumes at all. There are a few people on youtube who’ve tried similar techniques, and quite a few who have used different heat or dye sources.
Aesthetically, the process was only marginally successful, though I’m optimistic about the longevity, at least compared to other low-end manufacturing techniques. I’ve been using a similar set of home-lasered keycaps for about a month with little to no wear. My jig was not as good on that set, AND I tried to center the keycap legends, meaning every fraction of a millimeter was painfully obvious. These legends didn’t end up exactly where I might have liked either, but they’re all off by the exact amount (about 1mm), so being consistent, the alignment isn’t too bad.
Keyboard looks great! Did you laser the keycaps directly on the keyboard or in some sort of holder?
Doing it on the keyboard could very easily work, but I have a laser-cut jig that holds twenty-six 1u keycaps, and has one open-ended spot for anything up to maybe 3u. I considered 3D-printing the jig, but 30 minutes on the laser made more sense than 5 hours on the printer.
This plastic didn’t love my “Infusible ink” pens, so the legends are duller than the last time I did this, but the jig helped a lot with alignment, as did adjusting my ambitions and expectations. Much less disappointing to land 1 off when you can pretend you wanted it there all along, and that is much easier to do with corner legends versus centered. :-)
I like the look. I’d totally use this.
I also want to call you crazy for putting another tab button on the numpad, just so you can say “they called me crazy…” after its wide adoption.Thanks. Kind of a 2004 Apple and Logitech thing going. Probably need another couple of years before it’s in vogue. white filament on the ptrinter though, so white keyboard it is.
putting another tab button on the numpad
Horizontal spreadsheet data entry, my friend. it’s probably one of the less crazy parts of this layout! Of course, ten minutes on the laser and/or 5 in the software, and I can make it any key you need. Programmable keyboards are a godsend when you’re winging it on the layout.
Can you direct me to some helpful guides on programmable keyboards? If I can figure out how to non-destructively float the keys, levers, and letters and how to non-destructively establish a common, I’d like to tackle converting a mechanical typewriter I found into a Bluetooth keyboard.
It should be doable. The way these things are wired, you wouldn’t use a common. You’d instead wire a matrix with diodes to avoid ghost presses. The firmware on the arduino or RPi microcontrollers will constantly scan for keypresses. So much would depend on the exact mechanism of your typewriter, but you could find a place where a keycap moves parts in close enough proximity to make your own switches, or if some part of the mechanism presses straight down, you could just have that actuate mechanical keyboard switches.
For wireless, you’d probably want ZMK. QMK is the most famous, but ZMK supports more wireless MCUs. I use KMK, a firmware where everything is human-readable python. I understand it has some wireless support, but I’ve never looked into it.
Interesting! This makes everything seem so much more doable and impossible at the same time! If possible, I’d love the actual letter hitting the ribbon to be my “key press” just to make things that much more authentic(annoying).
Are there nice options for wired? I just assumed Bluetooth was the standard way to go on a kit, but it would be far more comically satisfying to plug my typewriter into a USB port.
All those firmwares work fine, or even better, over USB. Of course, there’s also the option to simply buy a kit. No idea if these people are legit, but the tech itself looks simple enough, a circuit board with contacts that let the linkage make a connection.
Half my brain thinks this looks awesome, and I love it, and the other half is aghast at its non standard shape and hates it.
