Building the Cheapino v2

Lore

I got mechanical keyboard-pilled for some reason a while back and decided to give it a try and got a cheap but quite worth it for its price Redragon Kumara K552, or maybe I am biased because I have been using the thang for a year now.

The novelty of a cheap mechanical keyboard did not last very long of course even though I added some mods like Tempest tape mod and case foam mod.

WE WANTEDS THE THOCC but I did not chase it too long and moved on, partly because I had me headphones on most of the time, I guess. Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E AI model.

Also did not pay too much attention at how it felt to type because no frame of reference of using a good mechanical keyboard.

I came across people building and sharing split keyboards on youtube and reddit and I got a bit curious, looked into some of those videos and one of the videos that absolutely peaked my interest was this video by Ben Vallack.

Vallack’s video exposed me to the amount of control one can have when building a keyboard from scratch (especially since I use Arch btw on my laptop asw as desktop) but the best thing I came across and got to know about was QMK.

The fact that I can have a custom firmware running on my keyboard and be able to customize everything about it alongwith other community supported features was very compelling.

The idea of using QMK was very compelling as I was switching the position of my CONTROL and CAPSLOCK keys but it was annoying because I was also using a XP-Pen tablet¹ for handwritten notes and practising problems and its dogshit drivers would send wrong keycodes when using C-z or any keycodes that had CONTROL on them.

Also it was annoying to switch the keys themselves, on windows there’s probably only PowerToys(honestly it was annoying to find a way to do this on Windows) and if using X11 on Linux then Arch Wiki ftw got your back.

But I had left behind both X11 and Windows and was using Hyprland which is a Wayland compositor and there were problems trying to the switch the layout, I asked around and was directed to KMonad, the blazignly fast™ written in Rust and cross platform Kanata and also keyd, these are all software solutions that give you some features from QMK like layers and custom keymaps and prolly more depending on which of these you choose to use.

I of course procarstinated and did not setup any of these solutions and continued to use my scuffed setup.

Oh well I decided I was going to build a custom split keyboard for meselves with QMK support but the problem was sourcing parts and the eventual cost of said parts, some sites do sell kits but the cost was still a bit prohibitive even without factoring in shipping and the greedy, fat, useless cunts at customs marking up honest consumers.²

I wanted a split because of ergonomics³ and RSI as I was already experiencing some pain around the wrists after prolonged sessions of using the mouse, one reason I got an ergonomic mouse so I dont use the mouse in a pronated position for long, my mouse use has decreased a lot after I switched to neovim btw and mostly use it for few games and while using the browser.

I was in a limbo between Corne and Lily58 Pro as my first keyboard but of course the cost was kinda prohibitive as a broke student, hand-wiring was also an option and I legit wanted to handwire a corne, all the while I was seeing people being really discouraging about handwiring things online and knowing full well I would suffer lots if I went that route.

Oh well long story short got a deal by a guy who was selling some cheapino-v2 DIY kit, it was not a corne or lily58 but I liked the placement of the thumb cluster so I ordered it.

The Build

The components arrived, I laid my grubby hands on the PCBs, it was blyatiful

Welp, it was time to put together the whole keyboard, first order of business was soldering teh components onto the PCB, and the first component were the diodes.

Oh well these are SMD diodes. they are tiny and very unwieldy and it did not help that this was my first time trying to solder something to a PCB⁴.

I was kinda hesistant due to the possibility of damaging the components, although for backup I had some through hole 1N4148 diodes and I should have used those in the first place instead of deez but oh well.

This was probably the most time taking part of the build, probably handwiring a keeb wouldn’t have been more headache than these, these things would move around, also did not have helping hands to hold the PCB, just a cardboard box and a negative action tweezer that came in handy after I got used to soldering a bit.

Oh well after probably 2-3 hours of inhaling soldering fumes and fidgeting around with SMD diodes the left part of the PCB was done.

It was TIME TO TEST the thang, so I slotted in the MCU without soldering it (foreshadowing) and flashed it with the firmware and fired up VIAL, and despaired because I was testing the key presses by shorting the switch holes and nothing was happening…because I was in the “Keymap” tab, and needed to switch to the “Matrix tester” tab.

And boy when the first keys lighted up I was ECSTATIC, proceeded to test the whole left side and all the keys did light up quite well, did a little dance, called Billu G, who also proceeded to light up the switch matrix and celebrated with me.

After all this I again went through the same motions and soldered the components on the right side asw, put in the RJ45 jack that connects the two parts and did the test again and proceeded to shit myself because the right-most column and the thumb cluster was not working.

Welp I started looking through the troubleshooting guide and remember when I just slotted in the MCU? Yeah well, thats stooped, so went ahead and soldered the MCU and things fixed themselves.

Welp it was time to solder the final components which were the hotswap sockets for the switches which took me less than 10 minutes for both sides after the drudgework that was soldering SMD diodes…man I ain’t using those again.

I went ahead and soldered the hotswap sockets and put in the switches, oh well one freshly baked custom split keyboard running some baller open source firmware was done in functionality.

Now it was time to get some keycaps and learn to type again, I got some noice keycaps from Meckeys, heres the final product.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, ITS MY PRECIOUS!

I did not go with a case, I did get one 3D printed which had tenting support but I did not like it very much, instead opted for two adjustable mobile stands and I am quite enjoying me setup.

This is what it looks like now.

This is what it feels like