Updates

Good news, the writer looks and feels wonderful when assembled. Bad news, I've encountered a series of problems with this PCB. Right off the bat, it seemed like there was no bootloader that should have been already programmed to the microcontroller. Then when I went to try putting on the bootloader myself, the whole device was never detected at all. Turns out there was a missing fuse intended to protect the board from a bad USB port or any similar shorts. It was listed in the PCB files that were sent but not placed on the board. Not a huge deal...

I have my bulk materials and the current stop is the lead time on the PCBs' arrival. The minimum quantity for PCBs I could feasibly pick was 5 and the lead time on the PCBs is nearly a month. This means that, assuming the PCB works fine, the first 5 orders for the keyboard are going to be sent out earlier. The last order that fits within this window is #1066. Fingers crossed that everything on the case fits together with the PCB and the keyboard works smoothly!

Holiday family obligations are all done and finishing up the final details for the PCB is well underway. It is mainly small bits left like trying to figure out how to fit in all the pins for the interconnect cable between the pads for the keyswitches as compactly as possible without overlapping. Ordering enough PCBs for 100 writers is something I realized I cannot afford eating the risk of messing up. I think instead of going directly from the raw breadboard test to ordering the full batch of finished PCBs (to bring the keyboards out absolutely as fast as possible), just...

Here is a really bad scribble of the new keyboard: The design for the new version is essentially complete, with a few PCB kinks to iron out. I'll leave preorders open to make purchasing the materials in bulk a bit easier on my wallet. Right now I have the product pages changed to list the new version, with no photos uploaded yet. I am having a friend help me make a rendering of the current design and posting it very soon. It is a flat design split into two separate halves with metal plates sandwiching their PCBs between them using small metal standoffs....

The laptop I use for running the mill has died after a couple years of life. I took it apart and the GPU is completely toast, as in brown burn-marks on the PCB and melty solder type of toast. New mill controller laptop is arriving Wednesday (hooray for Amazon Prime two-day shipping) so production resumes two days from now.