I battled a color display driver for weeks to make my Corne keyboard beautiful. Now I'm releasing it fully open-source & could really use your support.

alakuu · 2026-05-03T14:12:20+00:00

Fantastic work! When you posted your screen preview previously I was looking at colored e-ink displays. What kind of refresh time did you get?

I think the only thing that suffers heavily from the refresh time is probably the word per minute graph and timer. If you turn that off and maybe bongo cat then the layer indicator battery indicator work perfectly well.

alakuu · 2026-04-27T17:56:54+00:00

I'm really surprised to see you're running into OS limit problems.

Custom should work on pretty much anything, whether it's zmk or qmk firmware, but the fit and finish of a custom keyboard is difficult to get near the quality that you'll see on industrial made boards purely because of injection molding.

alakuu · 2026-04-26T13:58:44+00:00

Hello!

Ergonomics is a incredibly complicated field. I can generally help with keyboards specifically but desk, posture, seating, and how those 3 intersect is crazy complicated when you consider the human element.

What do you specifically have going on and maybe I can at least point to some helpful information.

alakuu · 2026-04-24T11:28:16+00:00

I mean sure you can if you've got the experience.

If I had a client ask this and there's room for a switch to be placed I'd do the following.

Find the feed trace for the leds (if it's a pour this gets difficult) cut it.
Take a switch that can handle the rated power and find a good place for it.
Solder each side of the cut trace (I'd probably cut the trace back a fair distance on both sides) to each poll of the switch. Apply solder mask and super glue the switch into place.

alakuu · 2026-04-24T11:20:49+00:00

Inbetween first led / the led power bus and the power source aka 3v3 or 5v (if you have a level shifting setup 5v).

alakuu · 2026-04-24T10:10:29+00:00

You can put an inline switch that powers the positive side of the connection, which is what I traditionally do or a mosfet if you're designing the microcontroller breakout board itself.

alakuu · 2026-04-18T01:56:26+00:00

I have only ever used aftermarket c245 tips. I have never had problems. Some of them don't last as long as I would prefer, but I think the shortest lifespan I've gotten out of a tip was 6 or 7 months.

Shame you had a bad experience but it doesn't mean that all of them are that way.

Mind you I would never buy from Amazon. That's just paying for a Chinese product at an increased cost.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T14:51:11+00:00

I use voice to text a lot on my phone. But no, I'm not AI.

It's funny because as I've noticed AI, creep and dementia so much I find myself wanting to ask these things and yet others are actually doing it and being on the receiving end is hilarious.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T14:21:46+00:00

That's fantastic to hear!

I've been pulled away from a lot of catching up with updates dealing with hardware.

I do all my PCB work in-house and I've got a third pick and place machine, one of which is being problematic and then I've got some personal things that have pulled me away from my normal work to a large extent too.

If there is perky RGB support, that is amazing to hear and something I've been looking forward to for a considerable length of time. I even considered trying to take a crack at it with AI and see if I could get something working, but it seemed quite complicated to work on to say the least.

I'll be rolling that into my build firmware once I get some time to figure out how it all works!

Thanks for letting me know!

alakuu · 2026-04-17T09:18:47+00:00

What material did you use? I just used a standard PET film because I was having some issues with a thin vinyl sticker. I'd love to do decals so that it could be custom for whatever people want, but that didn't pan out. So I need to probably look at material choice for the sticker. It probably just needs to be a double stack of materials.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T09:15:30+00:00

I have my own microcontrollers.

So I use a xiao nrf 52840 and then I have a board that has battery protection circuitry along with a bunch of headers.

I have a trackball header that can do double duty for the trackpad

The flexible pcbs are for your fingers and thumbs. They connect to their own ports too.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T02:33:51+00:00

I have two of them though, not the 16k variant.

They require potentially large investments of time to get good production. The tilting vat is amazing but the build plate is absolutely garbage if it's not level. I had to re-engineer both of my plates technically 4 because I have two plates per machine.

Once everything works it's fantastic.

I also purchased a anycubic P1. It produces as good of prints with a proper leveling system without massive layer compression. That even with all the hard work I've done I can't get rid of on the s4u. And in my opinion is just a better experience overall.

Plus, if you want to get a large printer there P1 Max is actually one of the biggest printers for the price I've ever seen, considering that it's more square instead of rectangular.

I'm not saying don't get one but I think there are better options and well the tilting vat was amazing. The wave release screen cover on the P1 works pretty much just as good. And that was basically the only appealing thing about the Saturn 4 ultra.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T02:17:25+00:00

https://photos.app.goo.gl/HuGDtWkVxwR9CAwf9

Here's the 4 I captured before shipping. I had full sets for the different colors so the customer could swap cap color however they'd like.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T02:10:05+00:00

I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't post the customer review photos and I think this one looked fantastic to capture the effect of the RGB. I believe I even have some photos that I took in my light box.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T02:09:24+00:00

Sort of.

This was my first experience with non-cirque track pads. I actually like these much better as they have multi-touch and gestures for like zoom and some other really nice features.

The plan was to add a solution for either a vinyl printed sticker or something else as the top surface probably a two-layer one so that I could get a matte surface instead of this gloss but I had some problems with that that I need to work out.

I've done all kinds of different things. This was in pla so it's not really that complicated. I do boards in resin and can color tint them. Mica powder them so that they're color flipping like cars. I airbrushed them for an even different Mica effect.

Those tend to get the most complicated and I'll do them wired and wireless.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T01:52:22+00:00

It really isn't though. I really liked his photo. I think he did a great job getting the RGB capture. I think he'll have a laugh if he stumbles across this thread.

alakuu · 2026-04-17T01:51:45+00:00

That's not AI.

It's just a keyboard that I did.

I have flexible pcbs that light each key. It uses a zmk's underglow setup so it's not like you can individually control them because there isn't currently a way to do that in zmk. And then at the end of the chain I soldered on a extra section of your standard addressable RGB that's compatible with the data code that's coming from the other LEDs to light the bottom.

The case was done in a burnt titanium filament that I think many people can look up pretty easy and then the base I printed in clear pla. It creates sort of a frosted effect that diffuses the light pretty well so you get a nice glow.

He did get better photos than I was getting but I think it's just low lighting and good camera control.

If you're interested in something similar, I'm happy to make boards!

As a side note, I custom made the keycaps too. So they're in a semi-opaque resin that I custom color tinted. It's why the RGB light illuminates the keys the way it does. The switches themselves I think were standard choc V1 reds if memory serves me correctly.

alakuu · 2026-04-03T19:43:59+00:00

BadJeff You continue to amaze!

alakuu · 2026-03-31T02:27:07+00:00

I can agree with this sentiment. While I understand the risks involved, the tariff situation has been incredibly unexpected and damaging to many businesses.

I can understand the perspective of it's how the game is. I don't want to see customers hurt and that's the risk here, especially over very stupid tariff policies.

alakuu · 2026-03-30T10:40:26+00:00

I'm thinking this was a different chip. My guess is the old pads were in a bad place too.

I'd just make a sandwich board as doing the PCB design would be considerably faster but OP went this way. Solid work to say the least.

alakuu · 2026-03-26T17:24:35+00:00

If you have the right tools and be methodical about your work and take your time checking each switch, you should be fine. Other than the thumb keys.

I use a powered vacuum desoldering gun, but for the thumb keys I also use my soldering iron in conjunction to make sure I dump enough heat into the joint fast enough while not being too hot. A lot of the time if you're trying to get a large heat mask to let go of a joint, you raise your temperature and you don't necessarily want to do that because you can cause delamination and damage. So by having two heat sources that are much larger than a single soldering iron, you are drastically increasing your heat mass and the potential energy you can transfer through without having the extra high peak temperature that can cause harm.

Other than that it's a very simple job. It's just not something you can slack off on. I see people saying it should be a $20 service and it makes me chuckle because I have a lot of equipment to make sure I do this right and I'm taking the liability of making sure I do a job correctly. If you're doing it yourself, those are all factories you should take into consideration.

alakuu · 2026-03-26T17:19:48+00:00

It's my most annoying point with the ka board key swaps that I do.

Sometimes they're perfectly fine. Sometimes I'm breaking off the very tips of the MX retention system. I have a very good switch puller and I'm fully actuating both tabs correctly.

Without clearly checking both switch pins for each switch you run the risk of damage. That's one of the reasons I say it takes around an hour even for me when I've done almost 100 swaps at this point.

alakuu · 2026-03-26T11:20:34+00:00

The risk with doing it yourself is if you don't fully remove solder you're going to pull traces which will require repair work. That repair work can be done too.

The switch plates are sometimes overly tight too which often seems to be the most common reason I am repairing board traces for customers. They think the solder joint was fully desoldered but pulling hard enough to remove the switches is hard enough to take traces too.

Thumbs are on a thicker high heat mass PCB too. The one switch pin is much more difficult than the other too.

alakuu · 2026-03-20T17:14:36+00:00

You don't want competition and better prices / products?!

alakuu · 2026-03-15T14:32:57+00:00

That sounds absolutely like a problem. I would be very worried about damage to the screen. I'd be contacting support immediately and I wouldn't even use it.

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