ErgoDox Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard Kit Discussions | Drop

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ErgoDox Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard Kit

Jan 10, 2015

Got mine about one month ago for the Sep. drop. The delivery takes about three weeks to Guangzhou, China.
No missing component. Indeed the packages contained some extra components, e.g. a few extra diodes, two extra MX switches, many LED lights. The teensy chip was wrapped in a antistatic bag. However the IO expander and LED light just scattered in a big plastic bag, which was not well protected from shipping. The IO expander I got, many of its pins were bent like dancing. I felt lucky that it was not broken and could still be fix to straight by hand.
I built it at last weekend, the keyboard itself worked fine. But there was a mistake on DCS keycaps I got: a R2(middle row in the keyboard, which is the "asdf" row in qwerty layout ) 1.5x keycap was mistaken for a R5(top row in the keyboard, which is the top "1234" row in qwerty layout) 1.5x. It causes a height mismatched for one R5 1.5x position. There was no height/row mark on the bottom side of these DCS keycaps(row mark is usual for keycaps of mechanical keyboard), so I guessed someone made a mistake on recognizing or counting the keycaps. Already contacted support a week ago, no response yet.
About soldering, I hadn't soldered for years before I started soldering it this time. It was not easy to solder the SMD diodes perfectly right at the first time using a normal soldering iron. But it was not too hard after I soldered a few of them and gained some experience. A multimeter in hand would be quite helpful for verification. IMO, the hardest part was soldering the Mini USB connecter to PCB. Soldering in the assembly process required a lot of patience(and a few hours in my case).
I didn't use any LED light on the keyboard because the pbt keycaps I ordered were opaque. The keyboard still worked as usual without these lights and I feel all right about it.
I tried both DCS keycaps(which I ordered in this drop) and DSA keycaps(which I got from a friend). The varying slants of DCS make my fingers feel more comfortable than DSA when typing. The touch feeling on surface of DCS was more delicate and smoother than DSA. Perhaps it was just a delusion.
It took a long time to source and build such a unique keyboard: wait for this drop to open, join this drop, wait for shipping and delivery, and assemble it by hand. Finally, I am happy typing my Ergodox right now!