I’ve been busy building a few Mantis v0.3.3 builds for friends and family. It took me way longer to build these than I had planned, and I still have a few more builds to go before I work on the next version of the design. But I’m getting better at this, and very happy with how these turned out. It’s nice to try out different switches. On these boards I used Choc Sunset, Pro Red and Pink switches. They all work great with the sculpted key caps.
The two keyboards in the front use clear acrylic case plates and key caps made of two different resin materials to highlight the home keys. They are translucent enough for the backlight. The one in the back is made with birch plywood plates, painted with 3 coats of shellac to bring out the wood grain and lightly sanded for a matte finish. The key caps are grey nylon. The small holes in the skirts work great for letting the backlight shine through those opaque keys.
I used KB2040 controllers from Adafruit for all these builds and loving the extra space for building the firmware with Vial support. My old v0.3 prototype with a ProMicro also works with Vial, but I had to disable some features and lighting effects to squeeze it in.
Beautiful builds! How did you like the Pink switches? I’m not sure if I could get used to how little force it takes to press them.
Pink switches are very light. I bottom out pretty hard, so they’re probably wasted on me. It makes a nice percussive sound in the wooden case, though. But I do find them quite usable with these sculpted keys. I didn’t like them on a Cantor with MBK key caps as it was too easy to actuate two keys at once by accident.
For me, Pro Red is probably the sweet spot for light linear switches.