I’ve been rocking Durock Anubis switches or a bit now (very happy with them), but they aren’t designed to let a lot of light through from LEDs.
I’ve been considering some basic DIY to allow the light to pass through better, but I can’t find a lot of info about how people do this, save for custom switch housings.
I’ve read light pipes are a thing, i.e. a piece of plastic/fibre optic to direct light. I could see doing something like cutting up pieces of a fibre optic cable, or strips of acrylic plastic, and slotting them through the opening in the switch housing.
Looking to see what people do, and get ideas.
If it matters, my board has south facing LEDs.
So, you could definitely drill out the LED slot to take like a 3mm plastic optical fiber, but you mentioned south-facing LEDs. I don’t know what keycaps you’re using, but if they’re translucent legends you want to glow, even with light pipes, you’re not going to get much if any shine-through. This is because the LEDs are just on the wrong side of the switch.
A quick test with some switches with built-in diffusers should show what the lighting will look like with light pipes. If that’s not looking like what you want, probably not worth the effort.
I suppose you could try something wrapping around the switch but that would be an enormous PITA to do for every single switch. And also would likely interfere with the keycap, since there’s no room on the north side because of the contact leaves.
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I have a custom aluminum keyboard that didn’t have holes drilled for the status indicators (i.e. numlock, capslock, etc).
So, I took the plunge and drilled them myself and used some acrylic rod to act as the light pipe. I did this because this section of the aluminum was rather thick and I wasn’t sure how well the light would show with an open hole.
It worked really well and may be a little too bright. I sealed the rods into position using UV Resin.
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Thanks. I have side-facing translucent legends (i.e. on the south side of the caps), which already do let some light through. I wouldn’t need a wrap around in that case.
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