Custom Keyboard Build

I've always used pretty standard, off-the-shelf keyboards. Nothing I ever really thought twice about. But after getting my first real experience soldering components at Lightsense Technologies, something clicked. There was something oddly satisfying about working with hardware, building something physical piece by piece. Up until then, electronics felt distant and kind of abstract to me. This was probably my first real entry point into it.

Around that time, I also had something I didn't always have before, a bit of disposable income and free weekends. So I figured, why not try building a custom keyboard? I had no idea what I was doing. Which honestly made it more exciting.

Shopping for parts was rough. I don't really have an artistic eye. I've always leaned toward function over form, so most decisions were straightforward: aluminum case, interesting PCB, linear switches. The keycaps though… yeah. At the time the fish theme looked kind of cool, my entire thought process was basically "just pick something that contrasts with white." Looking back, I lowkey regret it. They're not terrible, but they're also not great. Still, for a first build, it could've been worse.

The build itself took about two weekends, mostly because of one thing: lubing switches is actual prison work. I didn't realize what I signed up for. Hours on hours of sitting there with YouTube in the background, brushing springs, stabilizers, and switch housings one by one. Same motion, same process, every single switch. It was kind of miserable.

Once that was done, everything else felt pretty straightforward. Soldering, assembling, putting the case together. It may sound intimidating online, but it really isn't. And these days you don't even need to solder; hot-swappable PCBs exist so you can just plug everything in. There's definitely a deeper rabbit hole if you want it, but you get most of the result just from properly lubing your switches. Biggest lesson: more lube is not better. Less is usually better.

The keyboard mostly lives in my closet now. Turns out I actually like having function keys. But every now and then I take it out, type on it for a bit, and remember what it felt like to build something completely from scratch. Then it goes back into the closet lmao