Hi There!
This sounds really cool!
A few of us have built keyboards in the past, a few of us have 3D printed and a few of us
have used computers to type in the past, between us we might be able to give you some
pointers!
It'd be worth coming along to the hacklab open nights on a Tuesday at 8ish to talk
about it - some of us might get animated and come up with helpful/terrible ideas.
For building a keyboard, you're going to need some sort of base design and circuit
board, and then buy & solder in keys manually. It's quite a slow process but can
be quite satisfying. Alternatively, you can start off with an existing keyboard - I
recently bought an Anne Pro 2 [1], which has an alternative, open firmware you can
reprogram [2] - this might be a lower barrier to entry.
As for 3D printing keycaps, we have a couple of 3d printers [3] [4]. You /should/ be able
to 3d print caps on both, but 3d printing can be fiddly and difficult, and you may not get
the level of detail you expect.
The FDM printer, [3] will be good for prototyping and design, but it doesn't scale
well, and needs a lot of sanding and tidying to get a good finished project.
In terms of batch and more polished completion, the Formlabs Form2 SLA printer, [4], will
scale much better and give you better products out the print, but it requires more
detailed completion steps. There's definitely less knowledge of how it works in the
space and we need some new resin for this printer, but that's easy enough to get!
Feel free to ask more questions! I'm sure between us we can come to some cool
solution.
Cheers,
Hx
[1]
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ANNE-PRO-Wireless-Mechanical-Keyboard/dp/B07Y53G7B6
[2]
https://openannepro.github.io/
[3]
https://wiki.57north.org.uk/projects/3d_printer
[4]
https://wiki.57north.org.uk/projects/other_3d_printers
--
Hibby
MM0RFN
On Tue, 8 Feb 2022, at 8:38 PM, jamiemckay2013(a)yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a newbie to programming/3D printing and I've had a project in mind
for a while- making a bluetooth polytonic greek keyboard.
A unicode block for polytonic greek is available
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Extended), but as I'm a novice I
don't know if this would be helpful for creating my keyboard.
I guess I need help in the following:
1) What to buy
2) 3D printing polytonic greek keycaps
3) Ensuring that what I type on the keyboard comes out as ancient greek
on my computer
Any help/guidance on this project would be much appreciated!
Kind Regards,
Jamie
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