Mechanical Keyboards

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Are you addicted to the clicking sounds of your beautiful and impressive mechanical keyboard?
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Here you can discuss everything about mechanical keyboards (and only mechanical keyboards).

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Another person would like to know if their design could work (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by silverneedle@lemmy.ca to c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml

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Heya,

I saw someone else post their KiCAD design here for review. Now I would like to ask what improvements could be done with mine. I read a lot of documentation and followed many a YT tutorial the past two weeks and I am by no means experienced with PCBs or even many aspects of microelectronics aside from PC building.

I know that the data line from the USB C connector could wind up being a source of trouble because of the lengths. Is there anything here I could do?

I can only upload single images for posts, so I'll try putting another one in the comments that shows the generalized layout of the right keyboard.

Peace and love

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[–] Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Data lines are nice and parallel, and are only a few cm long, so definitely shouldn't be a problem.

My main feedback is that some of those capacitors (such as C36 and C37) are physically very tiny, you have plenty of space to spare so I don't see a reason to not use larger parts like 0804 or even 1206 (using the imperial measurements).

Why do you have the spiral trace going to the power switch? Just for aesthetics, or something else? There are a few other places with traces making spirally twists too.

[–] silverneedle@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 days ago

OK, that reassures me.

I'll get to swapping the caps for bigger ones though I do like the challenge of soldering them.

The spirally tracks/flourishes I added simply because of looks. No intentional RF stuff going on here. I have the track smoothing plugin installed and felt bad about not using it. Besides, the switch goes directly to ground here so having a bit of "cable salad" probably won't do any harm, I could even draw a little Tux on the board if I were so inclined..

Thank you by the way!