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, I've done some research and will pop along on Tuesday coming at 8pm :) Thanks Jamie