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.
The keycaps are my own design, 3D printed at JLC. Their footprint matches these: https://fkcaps.com/keycaps/hex. They were the original inspiration for this layout and I used them on early prototypes.
I made a short demo video. Sorry about the bad audio: https://youtu.be/Rh3bqSVHcbg
Thanks for the vid. It makes a lot more sense now. I had it in my head to orient it 180 from correct. I keep forgetting you can outsource 3d printing too. I could see doing fdm test fit at home and buying some prints for the finish. I even made metal button caps for some of my controllers this way too so it’s kinda funny I didn’t think of it. I really don’t need another keyboard but it’s quite tempting.