Peter Lyons

Kipra Keyboard v2 Build Video

August 25, 2024

I made another version of the kipra "kinda pragmatic" split ergonomic keyboard. It's a minor incremental evolution of the first version. Key changes are:

Even MOAR PCBs from PCBWay

Once again the great PCBWay was supportive enough to comp me these PCBs. I recommend them for your next ergogen keeb or any custom PCB project. I switched it up this time for the white color with black silkscreen and went on-theme for me travel case with matte black & white PLA filament as well as printing some tilted keycaps in matte black polytera PLA.

Full Build Video

I filmed a full build of my 3rd assembled kipra v2. Mostly this will be for my own reference if I do another iteration, but it's there if anyone wants to watch.

Key Point: Solder Microcontroller First and Test Frequently

The main idea I'd like to see adopted into the keeb zeitgeist is:

  1. Test the keyboard works frequently during the build
  2. As a corollary of that, the standard advice of doing diodes first is bad for beginners.

It's very easy to solder diodes, hotswap sockets, rotary encoders, interconnect jacks, etc and only as the last step of the build plug in the keyboard to find it does not type. It doesn't show up as a USB device to the OS.

This is super disappointing and just no fun. I don't want folks to have to feel that feeling and then experience the chaotic troubleshooting it necessitates.

But it's straightforward to avoid this by changing around the order of operations to focus on testability throughout the build.

The build video above demonstrates this as well as showing several mid-build tests that failed and how I was able to focus my troubleshooting exclusively on the previous step and quickly correct problems.