Building a keyboard for the first time

Don’t want to read my yap? Jump to the “guide” section

Recently I was getting interested in split keyboards. I have a 60% but to prevent hurting my fingers I wanted something more ergonomical, and with that idea in mind I decided to search a bit, which gave birth to this tweet:

https://x.com/Konantt_/status/1932978691811819636

In this tweet something curious happened. I got sniped, NERD sniped to be more specific! @ponziprogrammer (Follow him) posted the following:

https://x.com/ponziprogrammer/status/1933330279999156482

Okay, now I’m hyped! I have never being a electronics guy, so my knowledge is very minimal, but hey, why don’t I try? So I went on my journey of searching how can I build a fricking keyboard.

I watched a couple different videos and read a couple blogs. Although in hindsight the whole build is not that difficult I confess I had some difficult getting the full picture with them. I knew I had to order a pcb, I knew I had to buy parts, but what parts exactly should I get? Is there anything I don’t know that makes X part not work with Y part? What is MCU? Marvel? What?

With a lot of confusion in mind I just decided to go with the most basic I could get away with. A wired split keyboard. I’m gonna walk over the details on the guide section below, if you don’t want to read the guide jump to conclusions!

Guide

I’m gonna assume you just went from almost 0 electronics to “I wanna build a keyboard!“. Lets go.

Choosing a keyboard

In case you didn’t already, the first thing you need to understand is what keyboard you want to build. On the split keyboard world, there are many different layouts such as sofle, totem, ErgoDox etc. Mine is the corne keyboard, which is a pretty popular choice. I would suggest you to go Awesome split keyboards repo and just look at the images. What layout you like the most?

Now assuming you choose the same as mine, the corne, you will want to decide on which version. The current latest version is the v4. While searching for it I saw a couple people saying that the v3 gives you more flexibility for customization, and that was enough for me to go with v3!

Ordering the PCB

Okay, you have decided on your layout, now what? You need to print the pcb!

Wait but idk wtf is a pcb
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I imagine most ppl don’t have a pcb manufacture at home, so you need someone to produce it for you!

The way I and most ppl do it is by using JLCPCB which is a pcb manufacture that ships world-wide! I’m from Brazil, and even tho it can be problematic to import products here, it was cheaper than I expected and delivery was faster than I thought it would be (20 days).

Now you know the layout you want, that you need the pcb, and which website to order your pcb from. But how do you tell them “I want a corne v3 pcb”? You can’t just ask that, you need to send them the schematics of the pcb! Those schematics are included in the github repository of the layout you choose, specifically the files -gerber.zip which is the file type used by jlcpcb. You can download gerber files for the corne v3 here.

Case

If you click the link you will see there are also plates-top-gerber.zip and plates-bottom-gerber.zip. Those are basically your keyboard case, so by the end you don’t have a unusable circuit board with just things attached to it. Those plates are made out of PCB material and are pretty simple, but if you dont want to bother printing or buying a case separately you can just use those.

Now that you have your file for the pcb and optionally the plates you just need to add them to jlcpcb, which will load them and give you options + the price directly! For the options, I didn’t really change anything, only the colors. Here it is:

Be warned that the minimum amount of pcbs you can buy from jlcpcb is 5! So you will end up with 5 pcbs to build 5 cornes if you want!

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