Some light necro-posting here, but I actually built one of these. So here’s a long-winded review of where I’m at.
Build Details
- M60 PCB & switch plate with integrated antennas.
- Liter 354080 3.7V 1500MAH battery (it was necessary to extend the wires on this one).
- Gazzew Boba U4 RGB switches.
- C3Equalz screw in stabilizers.
- Drop Skylight white caps.
- Stupidfish switch plate foam.
- KBDFans 5-degree aluminum case.
Assembly
The assembly was kind of a pain if I’m honest.
First, if you want to use bluetooth, you’re going to need a battery. Maker Diary has one they recommend, but it’s no longer available. Thankfully there’s a lot to choose from on AliExpress, but you find out rather quickly that the battery you need depends a lot on your case.
In the case of mine, I ended up needing to find a battery that was less than 4mm thick, had a 3 wire setup, a JST 1.25mm connector, and would fit inside the shallow cavity in the case I selected.
So once I got that sorted it became very apparent that the tray foam wasn’t going to fit at all. So I used some self-adhesive felt that seems to be doing a well enough job.
Assembling the stabilizers, switches, and keycaps was all pretty normal. Except for the delicate ballet of getting all the wires to go somewhere that won’t cause damage to them while you assemble the case. This includes the two antenna wires that run from the MCU to the switch plate up top.
Installing stabilizers, switches, and caps was completely ordinary. The outcome of the switches, stabilizers and cap selections is a nice sounding board that’s pretty quiet overall.
Firmware
Now comes the making it actually work part and here’s where I’m currently sat. The basic firmware works. The controls are a little odd and offer nothing in the way of feedback. So it’s not clear whether I’m disabling the bluetooth and enabling USB because when I try nothing seems to work. So there’s been a lot of manual power cycle and USB disconnects (thank goodness for magnetic USB cables).
I’m actually familiar with how the Python flashing on this works thankfully, but it’s REALLY slow. It takes forever for the little MCU to process new updates so you sit there wondering if it worked, but eventually you hear the little sound from windows indicating a change in USB status.
I will say this, the use of Python here is brilliant in terms of being able to rapidly change your key mappings. Because the Python script is re-evaluated on a change. So edit the file that you can access easily from Windows, save, and boom, you’re new mapping is ready.
The downside, in my experience at least, is that this system is more complex that say QMK and capable of just crashing unexpectedly.
Up Next
- Get the RBG working.
- Figure out why the latest firmware won’t take.
- Modify any mappings.
- Memorize the layers.