Yeah, I was wondering why no one has made one of these yet to print full metal parts. I know it won’t really be structural, but it would be pretty neat.
3d printer from 1931!
That is half the fun imagine troubleshooting that:roll_eyes:
Yeah. This one (with the brass rods and marine heat shrink) looks particularly neat and thin. A PCB would be thicker. Where the mess comes in is the wires for the rows/cols to the microcontroller. Cutting the wires to oerfect lengths off camera always makes me suspicious.
But I would do either. PCBs are fun. But some of the fun of making a new keyboard is just reducing the barriers to entry so you can play around a bit and try something new.
I’m not sure I agree that a PCB would be thicker. The switches are intended to go on a PCB anyway so the terminal stubs are longer than a PCB thickness inherently (Edit: Yeah, the switch has 2.65mm PCB alignment stubs and 3mm long solder pins). Assuming they’ve been trimmed down or crushed on assembly, you could still do that with a 0.5mm PCB. We’ve even got some 0.2mm thick PCB stock around here somewhere. PCBWay appears to let you go down to 0.6mm without increasing the cost or 0.2mm with an increase in cost.
The brass rods he’s using are 18AWG which is 1mm OD, so the total thickness of the 2x brass rod + 2x heatshrink layers at the thickest point are probably in the order of 2.3-2.5mm.
A standard 1.6mm PCB could potentially be 1mm thinner and going ham with the PCB could result in an overall stackup ~2mm thinner.
And agreed, there’s definitely a case to be made either way. Personally I just dislike soldering things directly to leads from a long term reliability perspective and I’d rather spend the time in CAD on a PCB and that’s where I’d find my fun rather than the hand wiring process that looks incredibly tedious to me.
Additive 3D printing metal by cold spraying fine powder at supersonic Mach 3 speeds and high pressure. Cast quality prints (i.e. not super high detail). Prints damn fast. Less material/time than working with large billets. Guessing SPEE3D’s machines are using a variation of cold welding or galling to bond?
Okay, that is pretty nuts. Hit two particles together hard enough to stick.
But plastic. It works, yes, but I prefer wood.
I think a mix and match here could be good. It takes a long time to design these, so this might help. I have made a bunch out of plywood inspired by Shaper origin website: https://hub.shapertools.com/search/projects?searchText=french%20cleat
Could have just used mine: French Cleat by Toko
Your link has some good ones as well though.
Nice. Don’t worry, there is still time to use yours. I just build a shop and have a lot of space left on my french cleat wall.