I have do some research about doing dactyl manuform, and I see people mostly solder directly diodes and copper wire to the switch. So i want to know that if i build dactyl manuform with hotswap function, will there have some problems which can kill my board? And when comparing handwired and hotswap. which is easier to do if i’m a beginner? And another question: is reset buttons neccessary for this build? (because i saw many guides are always including this component)

  • Aldoo
    2•1 year ago

    All my Dactyls are hotswap, so I cannot compare… But it seems that, as expected, stuff is more likely to move and break solder joints when you have hotswap sockets.

    A cure for this is to make sure everything is securely glued to the case, but the point of hotswapping, in my case, was the ability to hotswap the whole matrix wrt the case so I can iterate case versions until I print the one with the best parameters.

    So after the prototyping phase is over, I encourage you to glue everything you can glue, and screw everything you can (some per-key pcbs, such as the su120, have screw holes… but probably it is even better to use flexible per-column pcbs, instead of per-key, as solder joints that do not exist cannot be broken!).