What is swill
Sorry, that’s the Plate and Case Builder put together by a Geekhack user nicknamed swill. You pop in the raw data from Keyboard Layout Editor and tweak some parameters, and out pops a set of vector files suitable for Laser Cutting, 3D-printing (after extruding in CAD), etc. You can make the switch plate, plus enough other files to build a sandwich-style case.
My last two boards are built around aluminum plates I sent out to Xometry, but this one is completely home-manufactured using a pretty low-end laser. It can get through 3mm hardboard or plywood and can engrave a ton of stuff, but it has trouble cutting many other materials, and even 4mm plywood.
What laser are you using?
Comgrow Z1 with the 5w module. I’ve powered through 4mm plywood with enough passes, but it has a lot of materials it would prefer only to etch. TBF, it has handled everything it was marketed to do.
Super nice project!
The custom keycaps, that’s a dream. I’d love if there was a good method for that. I laser cut my board myself, too (but at a mkser space), and would love to make custom keycaps for it.
To speed up the process and perhaps get less errors, could you possibly do all of them at once?
Since you cut the plate, you have the drawing, so you could place the legends appropriately on that, then place keycaps on all switches and press play?
Maybe you could start with small dots on four corner keycaps in one go to calibrate/not risk bad prints on a full keycap set.
Maybe you could start with small dots on four corner keycaps in one go to calibrate/not risk bad prints on a full keycap set.
Huh. Yeah, it would need to be something like that, and that as a preliminary burn could work! With the one at a time, it’s invariably going to be slow and end up inconsistent, BUT on the plus side, an error in alignment or sizing only kills one keycap and there’s no risk of compounding error: being 1mm off is bad, but usable, while being one DEGREE off on a batch job could get much worse, and quickly. I specifically took a break from keycaps today to think on it, since I think every single one the rest of the way will be a one-off setup.
I may refresh my memory on how many spare keycaps I have and try doing a batch of 3-5 to see if it will work well or if there’s some other way to screw it up that I haven’t considered yet. My capslock glyph was going to be nicer and more on-theme that that giant oval, but early on I thought that simply placing the cap against a known 90-degree angle would be fine, but vibrations or something happened on Caps Lock and it came out a blurry mess. At least the “cover-up tattoo” has clean edges.
If batching out the keys does work well, that could make the remaining keycaps (and future batches) much more practical. For this board, the entire set of keycaps was less than $20, but everything else was cheap too, so I’m trying to make the “prototype” work with what I’ve already bought, LOL.
So registration marks were an excellent idea. After measuring the peak-to peak distance of the “dish” on the DSA keycaps, I set a 0.1mm dot on two corners and simply didn’t ink those corners. I’m still eyeballing the laser’s framing operation, but it’s going well enough that I ran a couple of batches of 9 keycaps with alignment no worse than when I was doing one at a time. I think a second set could be even better, with a proper jig for registration and maybe having most legends towards a corner, as centered legends need to be consistent and accurate. Corner legends just need to be consistent.
