from Hacker News

Guide on how to design keyboard PCBs

by Adrock on 1/15/17, 10:34 PM with 24 comments

• by paddi91 on 1/16/17, 7:21 AM

  Shameless plug: We just launched an affordable PCB prototyping service in Europe with native KiCad support. The PCBs are manufactured in Germany with a manufacturer usually working for the automotive and medical industry. See https://go.aisler.net for details.

• by Animats on 1/16/17, 5:32 AM

  Nice KiCAD tutorial.

  "Once you receive your PCBs, you can simply use some solder paste and a hot air rework station to put everything together!" Right. Soldering SMT parts is not easy and takes practice. You need to practice on junk or practice boards (there are $3 kits for this) to get the technique.

  Here's somebody who's good at it doing it.[1]

  I sometimes do this stuff, but the magnifier and tweezers thing is hard work.

  The pros all use lead-free solder now, but most hobbyists are still using leaded solder, which is much more tolerant of temperature variations.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7nCAxS2Rg

• by jimmyswimmy on 1/16/17, 4:09 AM

  Not sure about his paranoia over the crystal routing - it's an Atmega, the crystal is 16 MHz. Anyway, I think this is more of a KiCAD tutorial than a keyboard design tutorial (not something particularly high on my list of designs I'd like to do).

  I keep trying KiCAD but with a paid alternative (Altium Designer) through work it doesn't compare. The key to electronics design is the library. There are a few alternatives which are tied to vendors, like DigiKey's Schemeit. They have decent libraries of parts. I would have figured that KiCAD would too, but the last time I tried it was pretty bad. Hope that's changed.

• by wonko1 on 1/16/17, 4:17 AM

  This is a really nice tutorial, not just on keyboard PCB design but Kicad in general.

  I also recommend the excellent "getting to blinky" videos:

  https://contextualelectronics.com/learning/getting-to-blinky...

  Which teach the basics of Kicad too.

• by strgrd on 1/16/17, 2:52 PM

  Layout the keyboard here: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/

  Convert to PCB here: http://kalerator.clueboard.co/

• by swegg on 1/16/17, 3:31 PM

  I don't understand the decap network: why not go something more classical 10n, 0.1u and 4.7u, i.e. just a cap for each frequency range?