Birthday Keyboard

Its been a while since I last posted! Battlebots filming season snuck up on me pretty fast and I got fairly swamped preparing and competing. Time for some backlog posts!

About a month before Battlebots filming I realized that Jared’s birthday would be in the middle of filming and so I decided to get a head start on his silly birthday present.

For the past few months he’d joked about wanting to make his own ergonomic or more practical keyboard and so I thought it would be funny to make him a custom mechanical keyboard.

To keep things simple and ensure it worked on the first try, I opted out of making a matrix of keys and instead decided to map buttons one to one on a microcontroller. I bought an Arduino Pro Micro (Atmega32U4) which I knew could emulate a USB device, and some generic Cherry switch keycaps.

To make the most useful keyboard possible, I decided to spell out “JARED BEANS”. I used my laser with a printed jig to engrave the letters on the keycaps. I had to use masking tape on the keycaps to have the clear plastic cap absorb the laser’s energy.

I whipped up a quick 3pcb board and threw it in with another order I was placing at the time. I made sure this board fit into the 100mmx100mm “A little bit special” $5 deal.

The board was extremely simple, only containing the arduino, the switches, some pull up resistors and some LEDs.

A bit of 3d printing and programming later and the keyboard was done. It even works in Linux!