1. Skip your 1,2,3,4 and just get am inexpensive Cherry MX-Board
2. After several years, realize that I'm not really happy with keyboard because it boosts my bad posture. So I see if there is a split keyboard that suites my needs.
3. Damn, I need to test switches (luckily a friend has a nice selection of testers).
3. I think I might prefer tactile, but I don't want to blow the money on an expensive split keyboard to learn I don't like tactile - so better go with hot swappable switches.
4. Realize the exact board I would prefer doesn't exist.
5. Do some research on firmware, keyboard matrix circuit,...
6. Use the opportunity to learn kicad over eagle.
Started with 6. yesterday. Actually it's not that complicated, I'm more afraid of hand soldering 100 SK6812 Mini-E and 100 kailh sockets than of the rest.
When I opened up my board to swap the switches, I realized it had unused RGB pads...soo of course I hand solder 60 2-3mm surface mount LEDs to it. Yep, last time I do that :-P But it worked, which was the fun part...
the sad part is, I don't even like RBG on computer gear
I'm not a huge RGB person, either. But my Thinkpad has plain white background LEDs. And even though I type blindly 98% of the time, I find it more comfortable to have some (slight) hinting when positioning.
Sad part for me: TIL that most keycaps with "shine through" need the LED above/north of the switch (else the LED mostly blinds the user), which means I need to rotate all switches by 180 deg. But the GMK caps (which are considered some of the "best") are known to cause trouble with that orientation. And some switches might be feel different as well.
Yeah - my vortex rebuild (1) has south facing LEDs, so they're basically useless. The only thing I really liked about shine thru's was the ability to occasionally change up the legend colors (ohh - maybe amber or yellow legends today? or blue!)
1. Skip your 1,2,3,4 and just get am inexpensive Cherry MX-Board
2. After several years, realize that I'm not really happy with keyboard because it boosts my bad posture. So I see if there is a split keyboard that suites my needs.
3. Damn, I need to test switches (luckily a friend has a nice selection of testers).
3. I think I might prefer tactile, but I don't want to blow the money on an expensive split keyboard to learn I don't like tactile - so better go with hot swappable switches.
4. Realize the exact board I would prefer doesn't exist.
5. Do some research on firmware, keyboard matrix circuit,...
6. Use the opportunity to learn kicad over eagle.
Started with 6. yesterday. Actually it's not that complicated, I'm more afraid of hand soldering 100 SK6812 Mini-E and 100 kailh sockets than of the rest.