I'm reminded of an old Disney cartoon (maybe WWII era ?) where goofy invents artificial rubber. The catch is that it requires rubber tires as an input.
I guess the point I'm making is that 'scratch' is a pretty subjective line. I felt that the article qualified. When someone makes a cake from scratch I am ok if they use pre-milled flour and store bought eggs. I would be a bit annoyed if they started with a mix and called it "scratch."
I think in the 'things' space there is the notion of 'kit built' versus 'scratch built'.
It gets even a bit murkier when you think about wood working. Over the years I've built a number of things where the "plans" were in a magazine or an article and bought all of the wood, cut it to size, and assembled it "from scratch." but I didn't actually design it.
What I like about the keyboard article is that he designs the enclosure, provides his own wiring, and keyboard scanning software/firmware. So for me that qualifies as "scratch."
Perhaps put another way: prefab keys can only be keys; cakemix can only become cake; sheet aluminium could become anything; milled flour could become anything. 'From scratch' is making something from generic materials, to me.
- Carl Sagan
Probably WW2 era, because that's how the Nazi German synthetic rubber ("Buna") worked: It needed small quantities of natural rubber to produce (a lot more) synthetic rubber, with predictable results once the trade routes for that were blockaded.
I know. That's why I typed "WWII" (II = 2)
No confusion on the II/2.
Some resources on making your own custom keys from resin:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/key_modifi...
Do you know of any where the people built their own switches?
Given that, would you consider someone building their own switch as someone who's created a custom switch from these components? e.g. I've read of folks putting Zealios stems in Gateron housings with 80g+ springs to create their ideal switch type.
I mean if you wanted to be super hardcore, you could 3D print your own switches, your own key caps (or carve them out of wood), but what happens when you get to the controller? We don't have 3d printers for PCBs yet .. well none that are affordable for home use .. or that don't release tons of deadly toxins. :-P
A simple matrix keyboard (downside: will misdetect certain keyboard combinations) requires a quite small set of io pins (if you insist on fully individual switches it'll complicate matters a bit, but not that much) that you could make a controller for with any number of simple old parts that are big enough that etching your own PCB for them at home is fairly straightforward.
For that matter good old 8-bit era parts like 8526/6526 CIA's (IO) and a 6510/8510 CPU are big enough and resilient enough (and still easy to get hold of) that you can build a controller on a breadboard, or even mount them on cardboard you punch holes in (... yes, been there, done that), and you can drive a serial port off them (in fact, the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 keyboards at the very least used a SOC version of the 6502 with onboard PROM and RAM for their keyboard controller)
Of course, going the "next step down" and building it all from transistors starts getting a bit more hairy.
How do you learn where to assay for oil in the first place?
If you used a keyboard to make a keyboard, that is definitely not "from scratch".