• @wjrii
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    24 hours ago

    Thanks! They’re the twins of the one I just spruced up. The gray one is bare aluminum with oak spacers. Construction wise, it ended up looking a LOT like Matt3o’s BrownFox from like ten years earlier. No surprise, I suspect. The Swill plate generator I used was likely borne out of people wanting to do similar projects. It has Box Navy switches combined with Vortex-designed VSA keycaps that you can find mislabeled all over ebay/AliExpress/etc. as “double shot DSA”, except for the BBC Micro inspired F row, with is just 12 red DSA blanks and one that I lasered a design onto.

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    The yellow one has “Fauxly Panda” no-name heavy tactiles from Aliexpress, a 3-D printed case and feet, Akko “SA-L” keycaps, and a design (very) loosely inspired by the later Atari 8-bits. The color scheme is meant to sort of vaguely evoke the original 400 and 800. I am really pleased with this layout, which is just a TKL with the F-row shoved over, a few missing keys above the nav cluster, the Shifts split in two, and the modifiers shrunk down and reduced to give that “dangling spacebar” look so many old keyboards have. Only thing I’d do different is not split the left Shift. I just never got used to having two keys there, so all three boards now just map shift to both keys.

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    This has been an immensely fun hobby, and I’ve probably done a dozen projects by now, though I’ve probably topped out how refined my designs can be and still be fabbed on a 5W diode laser and an Ender 3 clone. Last project before the solenoid and aesthetic retrofit was my goofy no-stabilizers Battlecruiser, which I’m currently using for work.