I have recently decided to undertake a hobby project to build an Infinity Ergodox keyboard. Reasons being that 1. I want to do the whole thing from scratch. and 2. I haven’t actually seen the build kit on Massdrop for the last few months.
So I found two options for building the PCBs - Here at work I have access to a T-Tech machine that can mill PCBs, however the traces on the Infinity Ergodox are 6mil and the people in charge of the machine here don’t like to do any traces smaller than 10mil, so I’d have to redraw the gerbers for the boards if I were to do that.
Option two, there’s a place I can get them built for relatively cheap, but I have to buy a batch of boards - Which leads me to the point of this post:
Would anyone be interested in Infinity Ergodox PCBs for $20 shipped/set to the Lower 48 US? These would be bare boards - the components would be yours to procure and install. Which is where another issue presents itself; I have not found an assembly drawing for these PCBs. I have .pos file which explains the positioning for an SMT machine, but for hand soldering, it’s going to be a bit of trial and error on my part. I have access to Microsoft Visio on my work computer so I will likely draw out a proper assembly drawing with polarity as I work on my own boards.
In stock and ready to go:
These are for the base Ergodox, not the Infinity.
Also they're $38 for the set. Which is a lot more than it would be costing me to have the Infinity Boards built.
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I know this reply is probably way to late to the party, however I was wondering if you ever went 5hroigh with your ergodox infinity project and had the boards made? And if so if you still had any for sale perhaps perchance? I’m trying to figure out how to go about having the boards made myself, and due to being completely unfamiliar with how PCB design & subsequent production are achieved, I am running into several rather difficult speed bumps…
So, even if you never went ahead with your own particular keyboard project, any & all advice/words-of-wisdom are most certainly both welcome and greatly, Greatly, GREATLY appreciated.
With The Sincerest Gratitude,
HotBlackSuit
I ended up opting for building a KBDfans Ergodone and sourced AliExpress for the PCBs, since I could not find any interest in getting the PCBs printed. There was nowhere that I found that would make the PCBs in batches of less than 5. And even that one was kind of sketch - nowhere else would make them in batches of less than 30.
The downsides of the Ergodone are that it still uses the TRRS connection between the two halves of the keyboard instead of USB-C, it doesn’t have the LCD to tell you which Layer you are on (although it does use a pro-micro controller instead of the teensy, and the pro micro has a convenient red LED that lights up whenever you go to a layer other than your base layer) and, the big one for me, you don’t have any options for LED backlighting - whether that be the keyboard as a whole, zone backlighting, or per key. There’s nothing. You just can’t do it.