pca006132

I just did it for the wrist rest, as that is the part your wrist will touch regularly. It is too much work to cut many holes if you want to cover the plate, and I don't think it will be much cleaner comparing with bare printed surface. You still need regular cleaning.

Indeed, the major cost is labor cost. I was iterating on the design once a month and do some very simple tweaking (change the screw location for example). Because I want to make sure that the entire thing works, I need to solder everything for each cycle. Due to the lack of components, I have to disassemble old working keyboard to make a new one. I probably disassembled 4 or more in total. I was looking to sell the old one for $100, but no one was interested. I guess a lot of mechanical keyboard users are probably not used to split keyboard and DIY keyboards, so are not willing to buy it.

Not sure about others, I tried to sell me keyboard but without success, maybe split keyboards are a bit too niche and no one near me (HK) is interested. I just disassembled the keyboars to scrap the components for the next build, which is a bit sad considering a significant amount of time is spent on assembling it.

The main problem with SLA is the material and size. I don't think SLA can print ABS?

For wrist rest, you can stick a piece of TU leather to cover the printed surface, so it will look nice, be clean and comfortable. Not sure if TPU is sufficiently soft if you want a soft wrist rest, you would probably need something like silicone.

wondering if it is faster for you?

This looks pretty! Wondering where you guys get those fancy choc keycaps as well, I usually go to aliexpress (taobao in hk) and choc keycaps are much more expensive comparing to the normal kind of keycaps. I can usually get 60 normal keycaps for around $10 USD, but the price easily doubles for choc.

a soldering iron at 360 degree celcius

yes this is how I did it!

yeah, they are quite delicate. I wanted to use thicker ones but it is hard to get thick magnet wires. I never tried dropping them so idk, I guess making them less tensioned would help a bit

I am a vim user (and use vim keybinding for web browsing), so I rarely need to use both my mouse and keyboard at the same time.

I use thumb keys with mod-tap (control and shift, combined with some other commonly used keys such as space and enter), so far it works great.

And in case you don't know, for QMK, there is an option https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/docs/tap_hold.md#hold-on-other-key-press that allows faster hold when using mod-tap.