Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects
Noname ortho
A noname 5x14 ortho keyboard with underside socketed STM32 Blackpill – open sourced by steven3051.
Published January 5, 2023
People, give a proper and unique name to your projects so others can reference it!
The UnnamedKB1 is an open-source 5x14 ortholinear keyboard by steven3051 aka djask sporting a daughterboard on the bottom of the PCB.
This was my first time designing a keyboard, and wanted to make something with the STM32 which didn't involve it sticking out on the top of the PCB, but also able to fit in a way that allowed a natural incline of the keyboard – steven3051.
USB port issue
Steven actually doesn't recommend doing something like this with the controller board positioned the way depicted above. Eventually he desoldered the USB port and the two 5.1k resistors to shift to the PCB so that he can plug in a cable from the top and not the side.
There is no way to do it without it either sticking out the side or doing it vertically which makes the board taller. The blackpill board has A11 and A12 for USB D+/- pins available, so I added a USB C connection on the PCB itself to these 2 pins.
Design process
The author used Keyboard Layout Editor to generate the layout, and then made the schema in Kicad and laid out all the footprints with a python script with Kicad's pcbnew python interface.
The case is created with CadQuery in jupyter notebook.
Resources
Published on Thu 5th Jan 2023. Featured in KBD #110 (source).
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