Hand-Wired Mechanical Keyboard

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

To create the keyboard, I started by generating a vector image for the switch plate. This custom stainless steel plate was then precisely cut using a water jet at 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, I soldered every row and column 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.