Swetland ZX81+38 Mechanical Keyboard PCB only - 3 available

[Paul]

Thanks for the link. I ordered black ones from china. Don't want want to try out British Customs.

[Andy Rea]

thanks for the ebay link, i'll probably go with these as its going to be a lot cheaper, and if printed on some nice paper should look pretty good.

Andy

[Andy Rea]

won me a themaltake G1 keyboad off ebay with Cherry mx Blues, nice and clickey

Cheaper than buyinga bunch of keyswitches.

One step closer,

Regards Andy

[Andy Rea]

the ebay keyboard turned up and was immediately torn apart

have to make some sort of case now. but have a 3d printer so happy days

will post photo of progress so far when I get home.

still not sure what I am doing for key caps yet.

regards andy

[Andy Rea]

a bit late but yeah... pictures... click for larger image
Cherry Blues, two part 3d printed case with 6degree angle and black 3d printed backplate for key switches. so no gaps and can't see PCB between keys Still haven't decide how to go for keycaps yet Those WASD ones are blooming nice but $$$






Regards Andy

[Trevor_B]

That's looking good!

I got the 2 piece caps from EBay - when I've managed to print the labels I'll put up some piccies.

..and how did you manage to get the keys to be so straight(I'm jealous - looking for types for keyboard #2 here!) - no matter what I did some still came out slightly skewed!

[Andy Rea]

Ah well... 3d printer to the rescue again, although i'm sure that with enough time and patience you coudl do it with card and a metal strraight edeg, and exacto knife.,



that's upside down, the little squares are to hold this away from the PCB. it wasn't without problems mostly that the 14mm holes could have done with been 14.3-14.5 or so, i had to scrape every hole just a little to make the key-switch fit more easily, if using a parameterised cad it would have been easy to go back to the cad and change but i use TinkerCad for its ease of use.

I'm probably going to super glue the join in the case, have order some of those 2 piece keycaps from ebay but feeling that the flatness might not be too appealing. thinking about sticking paper directly top regular keycaps and applying a thin film of clear resin as a hard wearing layer ?

regards Andy

[Trevor_B]

Ahh Tinkercad!

I've just spent some time looking if I could turn a scan of the PCB into a decent enough SVG file to import into Tinkercad (so far, no success but I haven't given up yet!)
If I can get that working, the PCB has the outlines of the keys over every hole - and that *should* be easy to use as a template.. I'll let you know if it works (for future reference only of course)

tbh the 3dprinter option didn't occur to me (which is odd seeing as there's one about 3 feet away from me!).

Trev

[Paul]

Ah well... 3d printer to the rescue again,
regards Andy

Hi Andy, would you share your tinkercad and / or STL file(s) with us?
Cheers
Paul

[Trevor_B]

Ah well... 3d printer to the rescue again, although i'm sure that with enough time and patience you coudl do it with card and a metal strraight edeg, and exacto knife.,



that's upside down, the little squares are to hold this away from the PCB. it wasn't without problems mostly that the 14mm holes could have done with been 14.3-14.5 or so, i had to scrape every hole just a little to make the key-switch fit more easily, if using a parameterised cad it would have been easy to go back to the cad and change but i use TinkerCad for its ease of use.

I'm probably going to super glue the join in the case, have order some of those 2 piece keycaps from ebay but feeling that the flatness might not be too appealing. thinking about sticking paper directly top regular keycaps and applying a thin film of clear resin as a hard wearing layer ?

regards Andy

Thanks for the hint on the hole sizing - I've recreated it with 14.3 mm square holes but without the dimples/step-offs. My test print worked great though I only did a couple of layers to check the hole sizing and spacing before going all-in on a 4 hour print.
On the hole accuracy - if you're using Cura as a slicer, have a fiddle with the "Hole Expansion" setting - might help.

@Paul - I'm happy to share my version if you're interested.