Mechanical keyboards. An expensive complicated tedious acronym riddled hobby, and its a blast! If you've never thought about the piece of hardware you usually start and end your day with, well you should do a quick internet search for "custom mechanical keyboard." You may be amazed at the endless permutations of the results.
I started with this little guy. Not only can you customize the look of the keyboard, but you can change key layouts, layers, what happens when you hit the key twice as opposed to once, what happens when you hold the key down, not to mention having n-key rollover, meaning you can hold down n-number of keys in order to trigger a specific function. Then, you can customize the types of keycaps. There's different profiles, heights, widths, materials and looks. The more popular profiles are SA, DSA, XDA, DCS, Cherry and OEM. However, there's still many others I didn't mention. Then, you have switches! This is a fun one. A deep rabbit hole. You can geek out to the level of wanting a specific actuation force of the key. This is not the force it takes to press the key all the way down. Its the force it takes to activate a key press input signal to your actual PC. Many people even move to the level of having a specific switch oil, to oil there individual switches. However, I'm not quite at this level, yet. To be clear, this is not a build guide its more of a brag guide. If you're interested in a build guide check out this site: https://docs.keeb.io/iris-build-guide/ .I decided to build this as my first for many reasons. It was smaller and since I don't have massive hands, check out the ergodox, I wanted something that wouldn't require me to stretch my hands and start doing hand calisthenics. I also wanted less keys. Many keys are used rarely and require you to move your hands off the home row. With QMK, the firmware that powers the keyboard, you can have keys preform multiple functions. This is great if you want to keep your hands near the home row. Also, I have issues forcing my hands to stay in an awkward narrow positions pulling my shoulders forward, blah blah blah office ergonomics. Lastly, it's a pretty straight forward build and easy enough for a beginner. I built a custom QWERTY keyboard layout with cherry brown switches and XDA profile blank keycaps. I also dyed the caps black with iDye which was a little bit of a pain. It turned out great though. Wired LED backlight and RGB LED strips for underglow.
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