It's been about a month since I first had the idea to rebuild my keyboard and I got bored this weekend, so of course, I scrapped all the work I did before and started from scratch. This time, though, I started with the PCB... because placing components in OpenSCAD was never a good idea. Fun idea, but a bad one.

So I installed KiCad and immediately died a little inside. This thing is massive. There's a lot to it. So I took to YouTube and found a few tutorials. Turns out, banging your head against complex applications for 12 hours isn't that bad. Going through a few tutorials and using the existing ErgoDOX project as a reference, it took about 12 hours total for me to learn enough KiCad to do this:

It's ugly, sure, but I'm a little proud of it. Especially since this is the first pcb I've ever taken a crack at. I mean, look at this render:

I designed the board to be universal, like in the existing project. KiCad didn't play nice with the chips sharing pins and I'm not experienced enough with it to get it to work, so they're going to occupy different parts of the board. They're also going to be in the center of the board instead of on top, since I think that desk space is more valuable than the inch or so on either inside half. I also decided to use a 9-1u-cluster instead of using 2u (enter, backspace) keys. I was thinking I could use those as arrow keys, macro keys, and other stuff. More keys, more power. Plus, with this layout, it came out to a perfect 49 keys - 7 rows, 7 columns. Waste not, etc.

The next question is how in the hell do I prototype this.

10-minutes-later-edit: Answered that question with Elecrow. 5 prototype PCBs ordered for $62 shipped. Let's roll.