I should not have done through-hole LED's

I decided to use through-pcb LED's for....a reason that made sense at the time. I have routed these 12 LED's almost 5 times now because I kept doing it wrong. Turns out through-pcb LED's have to be on the bottom of the PCB...and shine through it...and therefore you need to route it with the bottom of the pcb....

So anyway. Here's the thing now.

Looks pretty neat, I'll give it that. I'm going to try and just import the entire document as-is into Onshape and then only the bare minimum case necessities. In theory, I'll be able to get a better, more realistic render. I just have to redo...most of my assignments I did and stuff....

Oh well. It'll be worth it. I hope. Hopefully Onshape doesn't crash again.

I got so tired of rendering things I added features.

Blender is...not easy, lol. I just realized that my battery mounting design is basically useless, so I'm going to instead cut a little hole to run the wire through and it gets to go beneath the PCB rather than above the PCB. I might even put the connector on the bottom of the PCB instead of the top and then shorten the Xiao's cutout. Not right now's problem though, later me problem (i'm not going to do that).

All good things have LED's and I do really like the little acrylic piece I have, so instead of clear acrylic I'm going to use white (or sanded clear?) and have 6x LED's underneath lighting it. Cuts my battery from a week on each side to about 8 hours at max brightness. At 25% brightness I get 16 hours of battery. I might also go for larger batteries than the 300mah's I have in here right now, not sure if it'll actually help the battery life much. Heres the updated schematic :3

I've also continued to tweak the render and such. Most of this journal entry was trying to make the battery fit and then realizing I didn't like the look of it anyway.

render sneak peek

I HAVE BEEN DOING BLENDER FOR THE LAST EIGHT HOURS STRAIGHT RAAAAAAAAAAAAA
i've made some good progress though. Took me 7 hours and 50 minutes to figure out that I should use Cycles and not Eevee, so...oops.

Sneak peek of some render stuffs though :3
i am very much tryharding this

Case but actually good this time

So I've put anywhere between 20 minutes to a few hours in every day for a bit and its been a while since I last wrote about it lol.

Main thing to note is the creation of this OnShape document: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/bd324f68f688888db1b7286f/w/950b43a6b53d722aa8f32892/e/0a7a8c50aa399604e02a5b40

DON'T OPEN THAT ON A LOW-END COMPUTER. it has just under 2 million primitives and will bake anything. It has permanently bricked onshape on firefox for me, lol. I did the lazy way of doing some of the design and it was...a mistake, to say the least. Just use a DXF, don't try and derive things.

Oops.

Anyways, here's the thing now:

I'm going to use a solid wooden, CNC machined base for the case and a brass plate for the top with blued steel screws. It's going to look damn good.

Here's the wood I'm going to use, actually. I'll have a finished photo in the next journal entry of the shelf that this piece is being used in.

Aaanndddd now its blender time. For the seventh time. I've spent so long fighting it. Note the graph of RAM usage on my laptop here:

My laptop was fully locked up. Like, hitting the power button didn't trigger a shutdown like it should've, I had to hold it down until power was killed. Whoopsies!

Off to try 7 I go.

Also checkout this cool sketch I made :3, bezier curves are so cool

Well that was long

Boy oh boy did I do a lot. I started kinda hating the way I did my battery stuff so that's the biggest change, I'm using a more common connector I actually have batteries for and moved some resistors around to fit the wire a little better. Should hopefully get a 500mah in here, depends what I have stockpiled lol. It'll be quite a good amount of battery life, though.

3d models are now in it too! Had to go steal some stuff from my hackpad onshape doc but there is now a configurable Choc OnShape component to use HERE :3. Off to my Reusables folder it goes.

I feel crazy saying this took 5 hours, but it really did. I didn't work very fast and I did a lot of little tiny tasks and MY GOSH the freakin kicad 3d model stuff is a pain to use and took forever.

Anyway, that's all. Redoing the case and then blender time :3

OH GOD I HAVE 50 MINUTES TO MAKE A CASE

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

the thing is now routed and I added the mousebites. Those things are annoying. Supposedly, there's 3 unrouted nets, but I'm pretty sure that they're unrouted because they're the grounds and kicad thinks the 2 boards should share grounds. I could probably run traces through the mousebites but I Don't Care Enough.

Keys routed

Turns out I forgot both the reset button and the power switch, so I'm adding those. They're in the red boxes on the schematic, pretty simple wiring but hey there's a photo of it in here now.

The PCB itself was honestly really easy to route. My first split was a 100% reversible PCB and it took a LITERAL 12 hours to route it because I kept having to tweak things in it lol. Horrible, horrible time. I think a reversible PCB would be fine now that I actually know what I'm doing, but I dont' care enough to try lmao.

I'm going to assign footprints for the reset button & for the power switch, then I'm done with the PCB :3

PCB layout go brrrr

my god this took forever. Ended up using Keyboard Layout Editor to make the layout actually like...exist, then took that and used it as a reference for placing everything. Major pain.

Also, I've been having a panic attack this entire time. I'm losing my mind a little bit, hence the short journal entry lol.

Foto

Schematic :3

Schematic is done!

I've decided to not use a pg1316. Turns out that they're really hard to find available anywhere and it's honestly just not worth the trouble, especially for the extra cost. I would rather put the extra cost into a nice aluminum case or getting nicer wood to CNC my own case out of. A friend of mine is making some shelves right now and the wood he's using is damn beautiful, I might just use some of that rather than the crazy multiple wood type stuff. We'll see what I end up deciding when I start making the case, though. Renders are going to probably just show a single piece case with a nice texture on it, I have an idea to make it a really nice render (I call it locking in on Blender for 16 hours straight and learning to animate and render in that, putting my 4080 to work. Rhymes with Grug).

Thanks yall :3

Changed to a 5V regulator

Talked to some friends, turns out neopixels really want to have 5V and will brownout at ~3.7V, so they would've been pretty useless with the 3.3 I was giving them.

The xiao itself has a regulator to output 3.3V, so I'll be using that to control the brushed drivers. While the drivers I'm using claim to be capable of -0.5 to 5.75V, I know that a similar driver used on the Malenki Nano operates great at 3.3V, so I'm going to use it here too and give myself some headroom.

There's also a second neopixel now, because I figure you can never really have too many neopixels. Turns out I also forgot to add the label for the neopixel data in, so that's here now too.

Made a rough layout & concepting.

This lil goober took way too long to come up with the design for. I actually spoke with a keyboard nerd friend for quite a while about the layout and ended up deciding that a Sofle main with a modified Voyager thumb cluster would work the best for me. It should be capable of sofle layouts out of the box which is really, really useful.

For some context on this keyboard:
I'm going to be using a CNC anodized aluminum top plate with a handmade wooden case, with a pattern sorta like this:

I'll also be using pg1316 keys like on Cyao's Leptosis, since I love how thin they are. The Apple Magic Keyboard is my favorite keyboard right now and has been for 3 years, almost entirely due to how little travel the switches have in them. The thing is amazing--but not split and not ergo. I want both of those.

My old split ergo has some issues because I was given the wrong solder, but it also just doesn't fit me super great. Some little issues really, and I hate the thumb cluster I came up with lol. This design will fix all of my gripes.

It's also going to be absolutely beautiful. The amount of build tickets I'll be getting is going to be crazy.