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Comment by muhammadusman | Hacker News Reader

Ok maybe not too weird but I've been a keyboard enthusiast for almost a decade now and earlier this year I started on a quest to collect as many keyboards in one place as possible to make it easier for newcomers to the hobby to easily find a keyboard (very much in progress still but making steady progress as a hobby project). I created a website called BoardSearch (https://boardsearch.io).

So far, I've learned a lot about just how varying keyboarding building/collecting can be, and this makes building the data models for what a keyboard is/can include pretty complex. Some people go deep into the hobby building a keyboard by soldering the switches and others a little higher level like putting together keycaps and switches on a hotswap PCB. It's definitely a hobby that you can waste/spend a lot of money on but keyboards are fun!

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For anyone else who's potentially interested in this, I found https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/ to be really useful in my foray into building keyboards. We spend so much time with keyboards, they might as well be customized to our needs :)

I bought a kit for my first build https://choc.brianlow.com/ and still think that was the right way to go, but some may prefer to start out with pre-built keyboards.

I've been building from a couple of kits and realizing the next step is to make my own design - what I'm looking for is just not on the market.

The one thing I find daunting is find and decide on a shop to handle PCB printing (non-US/EU). Especially since I assume my first couple of designs might need a few tweaks, I'd prefer something with short lead-times and able to handle low volume at reasonable price...

When I was looking into that I remember having read (or watched a youtube video, I was deep in a rabbit hole) something good about these companies [1][2]. Take it for what it's worth.

[1] https://www.pcbway.com/

[2] https://jlcpcb.com/

Seconding the other comment, i previously got boards for my Plaid/tht for relatively cheap and fast from jlcpcb.

Of course, if you want fastest you could cook your own pcbs, it's a bit involved but it gets you 3d-print times on pcbs.

I use JLC PCB for small projects at work, when we‘re doing prototype runs or just making a few units and don’t want to spin up our main PCB supplier.

The process is quick and mostly painless. They even have screenshots and a guide to exporting fab files from KiCad.

http://www.tifaq.org/keyboards.html has done this for alternative keyboards (see the Contents sections on the left) for contoured, split, ergonomic, chording, and so on. Bit dated now, but still interesting.

Very dated.

I help maintain on occasion the /r/mechanicalkeyboard wiki entry for Ergonomic keyboard buying suggestions. After using an Ergodox for five years now, I can hands down say that this is one of the best choices I made for myself, but not that anyone should make based only on my recommendations.

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