Constraints
Designing a handwired board with a set height can be challenging, and I wanted to keep the MCU in the body, and not having an appendage like my previous Keyboard has.
Thankfully, I (again) decided to use the RP2040 Zero, which has a small footprint and is not really that high.
Don’t let the angle give it away, take a look from another perspective.
Ehm, yeah so it’s tight, with roughly 0.5mm of clearance from the top of the USB-C port and the bottom of the plate.
But! It should fit, I will leave that to the test-print.
Caps
I had a hard time deciding on the caps for this build, originally I was planning on using a DSA-style caps, so I printed a set to try it out.
Admittedly, I have tried some caps of this set before on my daily at home
After evaluating the caps, listening to how they sound together with the board, I wanted to explore other options.
I had previously seen KLP Lamé caps, but at the time they didn’t have 1.25 nor 1.5u caps so I put that to the side in favor of CLP which had the 1.5u cap I was looking for.
So I decided to give my resin-printer a spin, and printed two DSA-caps and a CLP-cap, and it was at this time I noticed that my resin becomes too brittle for the higher stems that the DSA has.
And I generally liked the feeling of CLP better, so I decided to commit to printing them, and it took a while.
My resin-printer is not big, so at most I was able to fit 8 caps, per plate.
One plate takes ~2hrs, and my keyboard has 40 keys.