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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, and this guy did it the hard way. Get a teensy, some switches, diodes, and wire, and read this: https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/docs/hand_wi...

There is no need to spend any time on the software side of things. It's already been done to death.

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even if you want a custom plate, PCB, case, firmware, you can use community-developed web tools like these to do it all:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/

https://kalerator.clueboard.co/

http://builder.swillkb.com/

https://config.qmk.fm/

A neat response to this article would be someone making a keyboard using only these tools.

This is how I made mine:

(post is in Spanish, I wish to brag with my old mates:

http://clubdelpra.cluster003.ovh.net/foros/showthread.php?p=...)

I've been doing that myself recently. I have a 3d printer, so I took the dxf plate generated by builder.swillkb.com and just extruded it in OpenSCAD a bit for some thickness. 3D printed it, put it together with some screws (the generator even comes with screw hole options), hand wired the switches together, to a Arduino Pro Micro and programmed it with QMK.

There is no need to spend time on the hardware either, but OP wanted to learn something.

For those who might be interested here is my firmware project: https://github.com/marcv81/umk. I like to think it's more approachable than QMK, at the cost of features.

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