I now have 4 more that I will never use.
Sounds to me like it’s time to get two more MCUs, some standoffs, and some rubber feet, and make a pair of barebones boards, LOL. JLCPCB is pretty nice. I did an extremely simple custom design that was literally just traces and vias, and got 5 PCBs for under USD30.
South facing fits “Cherry profile” keycaps better, as well as old-school caps with shine-through lock indicators. Would be a bummer if you were expecting full shinethrough though.
I made a “Soarers” converter for my two. One was a terminal board, so it has about a dozen remaps and is semi-permanently wired in, but the other is a little black box that will take any PS/2 keyboard and make it a USB keyboard that changes the right Control key into a Win key.
It’s still a quirky old beast, but it’s much improved over the versions from years ago. They finally feel good enough about the assembly workbench, UI improvements, and topo-naming mitigation to release version 1.0.
Even if you’re not a veteran, Solidworks for makers is $48/year, or $38/year through “Titans of CNC.” You get a grace zone of up to $2000 in profit before they expect you to get a non-hobbyist license, which unfortunately is quite pricy.
For comparison, Fusion only gives you $1000 of revenue, but the cheapest commercial license for them is much cheaper; basically, they just want you to buy the license once you pull in enough sales to cut them their check. OnShape has no similar scheme, forces free users’ designs to be open, AND has a clumsily worded EULA that raises a distinct possibility that other users can take your stuff and sell it, but you can’t. Solid Edge is a simple “non-commercial use” for the free tier. Alibre doesn’t do free at all, but offers a very cheap version that’s limited by features instead of license rights.
Alibre is nice. I find the workflow pretty sensible, even if (like Solid Edge) it feels like there are sometimes extra clicks. The Atom version is super cheap and still has a proper parametric history, but is nerfed in ways that might feel limiting ( e.g. no Boolean operations, which makes mold-making and some other complex work quite difficult). When I was getting frustrated with FreeCAD, I was starting to look around at subscriptions and realized if I just waited for a sale on a permanent license for their Professional version (I also did payments), it would become a better deal than Fusion or Shapr3D within about two years.
Before that I was using a copy of “BeckerCAD 14 3D Pro” that I got from its German distributor for EUR20 with some reasonable success, but in addition to some truly aged and awkward camera controls and design choices, it also lacks a parametric history.
Best I can tell, Alibre does NOT support 3mf. It supports STL, STEP, and some other single part formats though.
It’s, oh jeez, six months old by now, but back in the spring I went through all the ones I’d tried. I ultimately settled on the middle tier for Alibre, with a permanent license. Pricier than Atom, to be sure, but feature complete for any needs I can imagine for myself as an utter amateur.
I don’t know why Solid Edge doesn’t get more love. IMO it’s comparable to Fusion for basic part design, and it’s fully local.
I actually got a license for Alibre, so I’ll keep using that until my hair finishes turning gray.
I was running into some errors with the FreeCAD Appimage in Linux, but the Windows version is running fairly smoothly, and it’s finally getting enough helper prompts and heuristic interface things to be less unwieldy, but it’s still FreeCAD. For instance, I’m still trying to find the easiest of three or four kludgey ways to project a face onto a sketch, and none of them are as easy as the purpose-built tool for that in Alibre.
There was existing precedent for a tiny version of Windows that is barely enough to run a single program. The original Windows version of Microsoft Excel came with a runtime version of Windows 2.1, so that customers who didn’t have Windows could still use Excel.
Fun fact, the “DOS” version of AOL did the same thing but with GEOS. Pretty impressive that it all fit on one 1.44MB floppy.
My first nearly proper computer was an Atari XE Game System. The keyboard is well known to be fairly crap, but it didn’t feel that way at the time.
Incoming Chinese carmaker Xpeng
Australian firm Pegasus Aerospace Corp received airworthiness certification from CASA for its driveable Pegasus E flying police car last year
you would need a pilot’s licence – not simply a car licence – to be able to eventually fly the X2 in Australia.
likely to be bungled in red tape for some time before it could take to the skies
We can take orders… you can secure one with a fully refundable $100 deposit.
So I guess a more accurate headline would be this:
“Australia’s” “first” “flying car” “now” “on sale.”
You got your group buy going. Awesome.
GB Aluminum 40s are not quite my niche in the scene, but I’ve loved seeing your development process here, and I wish you the best of luck. Pop over to Keebtalk and post there if you haven’t. As long as you engage with the community, the occasional promotional post seems to be fine.
This is the kind of low hanging fruit I’m after. Why do two Enter keys when THREE Enter keys is 50% more?!?!!
I don’t know yet. I just know I wanted a big dumb button.
There’s so many normal dumb buttons on this one that I’m running out of ideas. You got any?
Half the fun of using a nice keyboard is that it’s loud AF. I love my keyboard peeps, but I do not get the obsession with trying to make them sound all lovely and quiet. “Slightly quieter” is a compromise to be grudgingly tolerated if you have to work around others, nothing more.
VIVA LOS CLICKYS!
Those in particular are called XDA. They’re good for nonstandard layouts because every key has the same profile, which is to say it looks the same from the side. Amazon and AliExpress should have plenty of designs in that profile. DSA, ZDA, and a few other are similar “unsculpted” or “flat” keycap profiles.
EDIT: They’re most likely a clone set called “Gentleman”
Reminds me of Meow Wolf.
I’m not actually left-handed, but a lot of people like the southpaw style to keep the num pad around and integrated, but allow the mouse to stay close to the right side of the keyboard. I’m not sure what I think of the concept so far, but it came out pretty well, given the constraints I gave myself.
Thanks! I’ve tweaked the layout a tiny bit since those pics, but I’ve been using it a lot and it’s worked really well. Current project is to retrofit a little baby solenoid onto one of my fully hand-wired boards with tactile switches. Not exactly true IBM “KERCHUNK-THUNK!” but should add a pointless and fun audio feedback to a board I just don’t use that much otherwise.
But seriously… if there is a switch type you’ve been meaning to try, or some weird QMK ideas, add a plate from Keychron and (maybe?) the hotswap sockets, and you’ve got a perfectly legitimate build style.