Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Monolith
The Monolith, designed by u/sincerelyredcape, is built around an industrial grade encoder – and weights 15kg...
Published March 5, 2022
Under the hood, the Monolith is a bunch of Amoeba PCB's and a Teensy++ 2.0. A handwired keyboard with full backlight and "approximately 1600 solder joints".
In case you're wondering about the origin story of such a legendary piece of steel:
Where do I start? A friend of mine asked if I could build him a keyboard with the best volume knob he's ever felt – sincerelyredcape.
Knowing the EC11's wasn't up for the task, David found an Omron industrial grade encoder that turned out to be quite sturdy.
It's the size of a lime and wouldn't fit in a regular rectangle so I had to make room for it with the raised and angled back. The design should be familiar to some.
So that's the reason behind the Saturn-60-ish retro-styled case.
But there's still more to the encoder part: it came without detents, but sincerelyredcape knew his friend wanted those, so he had to make some more customization.
He came up with the idea of two separate discs with neodymium magnets. One on top of the encoder and the one on the knob. This makes the knob lock onto 20 different positions in one revolution. Completely frictionless and won't wear out in a very long time.
Wireless detents is the best thing I made in 2021.
The case is a sheet metal design of six parts, all welded together, and without bottom plate – it's about 15kg. All parts are 8mm thick except the top, which is 6mm. This allowed the author to tap M3 blind holes in the walls and top to accommodate fittings of a burger-mounted switch plate, encoder mount and the bottom plate.
In the process I broke four taps, one tap extractor and my spirit multiple times. Don't tap blind M3 taps in 316 stainless, I recommend it to no one.
Finished off with an etched brass plaque with a portrait of Erik (the friend) who will receive this on his 30th birthday. Text on the plaque reads "För Erik i tiden", which roughly translates to "For Erik, for all time".
It's funny because this thing will probably outlast us both.
Published on Sat 5th Mar 2022. Featured in KBD #68 (source).
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