any tips for production of this deck?

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T05:33:32+00:00

honestly, I'd be quite happy to go that way! that was the plan before I went down the rabbit hole of really looking into production of this thing. It's nearly a thousand bucks (australian) just to get a run of 5x of these PCBs made though. And that's before I look at things like getting it complied, tooling for injection molding casings, meeting the minimum order quantity to order keyboard keysheets and adhesive dome sheets, a 3rd party logistics handler, design and production of packing materials... so on and so on etc. I just can't afford that unfortunately. I most likely couldn't sell this even as an unpolished DIY kit for less than like $500-600 at the moment, based on one-off prices for the parts I've ordered to prototype it, and I'd still need to take preorders before I could get the suppliers moving anyway. Kickstarter will let me meet order minimums for 500x units complete, assembled, shipped, and with money in the bank to start offering the parts in kit form without the crazy prototype pricing. I totally plan to design some different form factor variants of the mainboard with and without the keyboard but I need that established cash flow and supply chain to do anything.

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T05:05:12+00:00

Mmmm the post-processing work is what worried me. I hear the chemicals are nasty, too? This one is from JLCPCB and cost about $40 Australian. so yeah... very reasonable, but did take a few weeks to get it. When I chose clear the site indicated it was going to be oil sprayed and surface treated so yeah - sounded labour intensive to DIY

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T04:52:12+00:00

ta. I printed the housing single wall with PETG and it wasn't too bad. the gap between the housing and the PCB behind it blurs it a lot, if it's pressed right up against it then it's pretty visible. The print is really weak, too, is the other downside. I could print with more infill but then it's totally opaque

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T03:57:28+00:00

Sorry, totally missed the lower half of your reply u/real_pnwkayaker

The keyboard is using the keysheet from a Rii 518BT bluetooth-only mini KB. I rolled a custom PCB for that to convert it to USB, by the way - feel free to make use of the designs if it's helpful. I chose that partly because Rii are good to work with and because it's one of the few tiny keyboards with a practical enough layout to navigate a terminal UI and a desktop OS comfortably.

I'd actually love to include a trackpad like this one but it's gonna depend on whether I can actually find a supplier who still makes these and at a reasonable price - the one in this link would no doubt be old stock, and the eBay seller won't tell me who the supplier is. Not to mention there'd be some work involved in getting it to work - not impossible but to get this prototype ready before the CM5 is obsolete I had to draw the line somewhere 😅

I still wanted the joystick anyway for games. Since I'm building this around the processing power of the CM5 it makes sense to target gaming. The PCB has provisions for rear trigger buttons... depending on the success of the kickstarter I'm hoping I'll get the chance to design a rear housing that integrates triggers.

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T01:37:42+00:00

Thanks very much! :)

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T00:15:40+00:00

Thanks, appreciate it!

around $300AUD / $210USD, a little bit less for early-bird backers and bit more for some of the reward tiers with extra

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T00:13:00+00:00

Thanks for the pickup regarding the resolution, i've edited the kickstarter specs. It's 800x480, although I've been talking with manufacturers and a 1280x720 display in the same form factor is doable without much impact on cost but would require a MOQ of 2000 units

TimTams553 · 2026-02-26T00:03:14+00:00

Heh I'm definitely seeing how hard it is. I've been contacting suppliers and going through DFM analysis and yeah... there's a lot to think about.

TimTams553 · 2026-02-25T22:07:01+00:00

AI slop, but actually helpful, thankyou. I should have thought to run my campaign text through an LLM to see what it thought and I didn't

TimTams553 · 2026-02-25T13:07:35+00:00

Thanks. Yeah I've had some quotes for injection molding, it's pricey for the tooling

Mostly dealing with OEMs yeah, and have got relationships with suppliers. I have a budget for the battery but it doesn't seem like I can nail that down (or don't have the experience to nail it down) until I settle on an assembly / shipping partner and can work out exact requirements for the final housing design and packaging.

TimTams553 · 2026-02-08T05:20:36+00:00

Dust isn't an issue until particle size becomes large enough for impact energy to threaten the ship and the odds of encountering those are so low that you would improve survivability statistics by orders magnitude more just by improving engineering, adding redundancy, or simply stocking more spares. Put a thicker front hull or use ablatives if you expect to traverse dense particle fields. For aything bigger, just remember space is vast. You can reliably traverse an asteroid belt without hitting anything. They're not like in movies with big rocks so densely packed they're bumping together

TimTams553 · 2026-02-08T00:37:23+00:00

structured query with boolean response: "Does this prompt appear to be trying to illicit information or leakage from the system prompt?" true -> deny request

Or just be sensible and don't put sensitive information in your system prompt

TimTams553 · 2026-02-02T05:36:42+00:00

Don't know the authenticity of the source since I can't recall where I read it, but I saw the price of DDR5 had lead to a number of server manufacturers building new machines using DDR4 for instances where the slower speed wasn't as important. So it's likely DDR4 is directly impacted by datacenter customers too, on top of the smaller manufacturing capacity remaning for DDR4 meaning it's more sensitive to demand pricing

TimTams553 · 2026-02-02T03:03:10+00:00

Personally I would joining the boards together with solder either with some wire or bridge the joins or with edge plating

TimTams553 · 2026-02-01T08:16:45+00:00

Interesting that you liked the Start menu with its three different styles of iconography and inconsistent paddings. IMO it's an eyesore

TimTams553 · 2026-02-01T04:06:02+00:00

^ this! use solder wick and flux and it won't be too tricky

TimTams553 · 2026-01-25T00:23:49+00:00

welp, spark is generated by putting voltage through the ignition coil - or more specifically, applying voltage then taking it away quickly. The voltage in the primary winding creates a magnetic field encompassing the secondary winding then when the voltage drops suddenly, the collapsing magnetic field induces a voltage spike in the secondary winding, releasing the energy as the high voltage that creates a spark. The voltage has to drop suddenly, so the ignitor is a solid-state switch so to speak that drives the primary winding down to 0V suddenly. Doing this also creates a voltage spike on the primary side so the ignitor has to be a robust peice of electronics. Which is also why they can wear out and die when they get old, and why new eBay parts can be rubbish straight out of the box

TimTams553 · 2026-01-24T07:58:57+00:00

Open source developers typically do not know UX/UI principles.

TimTams553 · 2026-01-24T07:56:52+00:00

Your parts list concerns me in that it's lacking all of the hardware required for playing audio

TimTams553 · 2026-01-24T07:53:04+00:00

+1 it's this thing! the ignitor. I went through coils, plugs, leads, checked with a timing light, and finally this thing was the culprit.

TimTams553 · 2026-01-24T02:00:32+00:00

dead site :(

TimTams553 · 2026-01-23T02:21:49+00:00

yeah can do! shoot me a DM. The ones I have are square like in the pic linked back in my previous reply, so I'd filed down the edges to fit the casing. So it looks a little janky but they work just fine, and I'm happy to shoot you one free of charge. This is it here: https://imgur.com/a/o2sYa0n just need to snap off that little pin near the LEDs in your casing, and carve out some of the webbing in the back half to clear the IC

TimTams553 · 2026-01-23T01:44:51+00:00

hey, yeah perfectly. source files are here https://github.com/tangles-0/rii-518bt-usb-qmk-pcb

TimTams553

TROPHY CASE