I built an atreus keyboard

I wanted my keyboard to be a bit different

I really liked @lucwastiaux’s stainless steel plate design but since I’d bought the full kit I had different switches and the holes in the lasergist design files weren’t right.

Instead of steel, I decided to get some experience using Ponoko to cut acrylic; I imported @technomancy’s eps files into Affinity Designer, massaged them a bit to meet Ponoko’s requirements and placed them on a P3 sheet of 3mm red matte acrylic. There’s leftover room on the P3 sheet, you could probably include spacers and do away with the nuts if you prefer.

• Here’s the Affinity Designer file.
• Here’s the resulting eps file.

Heads Up: these include my email on the bottom plate, you might want to use yours….

I liked the look of @lucwastiaux’s nuts and bolts but since my top plate is thicker than his I ended up screwing the top and bottom plates into the 8mm nut with 8mm low-profile socket head screws (see below). This has the added benefit of no sharp screw edges, since there are socket heads on both the top and the bottom. The “black-oxide” coating looks great.

Assembly

This was my biggest soldering project to date. I used a Hakko F888D soldering iron with a small chisel tip (T18-D08). I didn’t tin it properly at first and had trouble getting it to actually melt the solder (I was worried that I’d killed the iron). I cleaned it up with a bit of very find sandpaper, tinned it and all was well.

@technomancy’s instructions were great, pay attention and you’ll be fine. I wanted to use the “red linear switches” from the kit for my meta keys and ended up unsoldering a couple of the normal ones that I’d soldered into place by mistake. Measure twice, cut once….

Otherwise everything went according to plan.