Hand-Wired Mechanical Keyboard

I built my hand-wired ortholinear keyboard to convert a vintage Apple keyboard into a modern layout. My inspiration was sparked from Gary Thomas' Apple Ortholinear Keyboard. Unlike his keyboard, my keyboard has a custom 304 stainless plate, and it is hand-wired to an ST Microelectronics STM32F411 32 bit microprocessor.

To build this keyboard, I used an online tool to generate a vector image of the plate into which the switches mount. Next, the stainless plate was cut on the water jet that I have access to through my university's maker space. After the plate was cut, diodes were soldered from one leg on every switch to the respective row in the key matrix. Next, the other leg of the switch was soldered to its respective column. From there, every row and column was wired into the STM32F411 microcontroller.

The microcontroller runs firmware I built using the open-source project Quantum Mechanical Keyboard or QMK.

The configuration files for this project can be found on it's Github repository.