I've been getting many questions concerning the files for the latest revision of GH60.
It took me a while to convert the KiCad files to the new version and do some final touches, but I hope it was worth the wait!
Category Archives: electronics
60% Cherry MX 8100 mod
Here is an example of what you can do with your cheap POS Cherry keyboard if you have a few days and some basic plastic cutting and soldering tools. This is not an instruction, but a description of my mod written a couple of months after I made it, so it may be missing a few details. Feel free to ask questions;)
LED strip dimmer and potting attempt
This is just a quick build log of my super-simple dimmer for a LED strip while I'm working on the second part of How to make a keyboard.
How to make a keyboard - the matrix
Tutorial parts: 1 matrix | 2 controller (coming soon) | ...
Update (May 2016): check out the Russian translation: Как сделать клавиатуру — Матрица!
This will be the first and hopefully not the last post in the keyboard series. I'm hoping to make this a keyboard building tutorial from the ground up. Today I'll cover digital I/O and keyboard matrices. Equip yourself with some basic knowledge of electronics from school and let's get started.
GH60 evolution
I'ts been some time since I last wrote about the GH60 project and much more than I had thought has changed since then.
The rev. A prototype was to be just a testing board to make sure everything works all right before we run the actual group-buy, but in fact the number of changes and extra features added since then was so large that the rev. B is actually a new board.
In this post I'll try to quickly present the changes, new features and design decisions that make the (hopefully) final version of this 60% programmable keyboard. Continue reading GH60 evolution
Making my own pendrive (kind of)
This time not about electrical design, electronics or programming!
I had a pendrive which I didn't need at all, and because I found it really ugly I decided to remove all the unnecessary parts to strip it down to the PCB and possibly reduce the size.
The device I'm talking about is a Kingston DT108 8GB flash drive. And here's what I found when I broke it apart:
Making PCB artwork in kicad
Many PCB designers get to a point where they need to put some artwork on a board they're designing. Some time ago I had to do just that and it appeared that there is no trivial solution in kicad.
In this post I'm going to show you how to make pretty logos in pcbnew.
Introducing the GH60 keyboard project
The GH60, a 60% mechanical keyboard project, will soon be ready for production. In this post I'm going to present what it is and for whom it is.
Using Atmel's DFU Bootloader ABI on ATMega32U4 in avr-gcc
I've recently used Atmel's ATMega32u4 and I liked it a lot. 32 kilobytes of flash, USB transceiver and bootloader support are the most important features of this rather inexpensive device, which make it very easy to use for prototyping USB devices.
A nice addition is that the device comes preflashed with Atmel's DFU bootloader, which makes it possible to program the device over USB without connecting SPI or JTAG. It doesn't support any debugging, but it's good enough for simple projects.
I've been working on a project recently, where I assumed JTAG or SPI wouldn't be necessary and decided to rely on the stock bootloader. The problem is, I needed to change the contents of the flash memory in run-time. This is possible with the bootloader's ABI, but as it turned out, not that easy.
Continue reading Using Atmel's DFU Bootloader ABI on ATMega32U4 in avr-gcc
9999 in 1 reloaded - part 2
This is part 2 of reverse-engineering the LCD driver inside a COB device on a cheap "9999 in 1" videogame. Make sure you also check out part 1 here: 9999 in 1 reloaded - part 1.
Driver analysis - part 2
Let's look at the last plots again. Yellow is common signal, cyan - segment signal, and magenta - difference across pixel. This time I measured them with the LCD disconnected, so they should look a bit nicer.
