Modules! Magnets! MiRage Mk3: The Mechanical Keyboard You're Meant to Modify!

I am on a mission to make the world's most hackable mechanical keyboard my first try was full of dumb ideas done well the second was great ideas done stupid today we're gonna nail the bullseye we're gonna thread the needle we are going to appropriate a fictional concept from the mechanical keyboard community and enter the end game today we build the Mirage Mark III ladies gentlemen and cyborgs welcome to voidstar lab where it takes so much work to make a single video it took nine months to scrape together enough spare hours to make the Mirage Mark II yet here we are barely six weeks later and I didn't just make it successor I made three versions of it and accessories and a chassis and it's all because today's sponsor originally wanted a 3D printing episode but asked if we could switch to circuits this episode is sponsored by a product that does both and it's one you might have heard of fusion 360 by Autodesk jokes on them I was going to use it anyways if you've seen the parts rainbow my Quagsire The Mirage mark one the chromance the data blaster or really anything I've built on this channel you've seen me use Fusion 360. it's really the perfect CAD for prototyping because it lets you roll back the clock and retroactively fix mistakes but I've never used Fusion for electronics Technically when I started this video I was still using Eagle 7. Autodesk bought Eagle like six years ago and they just did it right into Fusion you just hit file new electronics project and there you go no downloads no up charge the real Electronics design assistance was inside you the whole time since 2014 they've added stuff like self-enforcing DRC multi-track routing cam previews and just tons of UI improvements that carved hours Off the Mark III I'll admit I also underestimated the power of being able to design a 3D model around the circuit board itself if you've never used Fusion 360 before you totally should and if you've only used it for 3D printing you should check out the electronics click the link in the description for a free trial to accelerate your next project so how did I wield this newfound power for a start fixing the many many mistakes we ran into with the Mark II the headline feature last time was the RGB LEDs and I learned the hard way that even these tiny two millimeter ones could pluck many popular key switches but I wasn't expecting a lot of the comments that pointed out that these teeny weeny LEDs look just downright terrifying to solder I don't think they're that hard but I I've been doing this for a while and my main priority is to make hacking The Mirage as practical as possible tacticality is about more than just compatibility with more parts it's about accessibility so more people can make their dream keyboard I know you got a dream keyboard so I swapped out the surface mount ergoblades for reverse Mount ergablads these use a different chip but are dropping compatible as in you literally drop them into a cutout on the board so the lens sits flush with the other side it's a sneaky way to infuse any switch with Pro Gamer goodness without increasing the profile of the board at all it doesn't matter if the switch is designed for through holes surface mount or no LEDs whatsoever this will work fine at all though I mean it won't help if your switch is black but you know just get some clear paint on top of that these pins are much much larger than the tiny surface mount pads and are just a pleasure to solder to pleasure it's pleasurable but I made a boo-boo neopixel style ergablids are 5 volt devices and we're using the Seed Studio Zhao rp2040 a 3.3 volt microcontroller it theoretically shouldn't be able to control these LEDs but the difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory in practice the old surface mount ergoblets work just fine but the reverse Mount ones did not so I had to hack in a level shifter The Mirage can be configured as either a monolithic plank or a split keyboard and for the latter you have to electrically link the halves for the Mark 1 the right sides microcontroller powered and communicated with the left side's i o expanders over a trrs headphone cable but the Mark II added ergobloods and interrupt pins so we needed seven wires instead of four enter my brilliant solution the SATA port it's got seven pins it's got fancy cables C seems fine except it turns out a set of cable only has five wires and now this worthless tape of regret will clutter my workshop forever more there really is no alternative to the 3.5 millimeter cable for keyboards we can't go USB because the gel doesn't break out the USB data lines we can't use modular cables either like ethernet because they're ugly and don't give me that personal preference horse a single standardized set of aesthetic preferences was hard coded into every human's DNA when we were still lobsters read a book so Zach cracked and tacked the Jack hack back to make it happen the Mirage needed a Monumental architectural change and while I psyched myself up for that I put the board on a diet the mark II's footprint was way too huge like nearly the size of a full-size keyboard despite only having the keys of a 65 percent I turned the Jacks 90 degrees to shorten the board and note how the left Port is slightly inset this relief lets you butt boards up edged Edge so if you ever want to switch back from a split to plank configuration you don't have to desolder anything despite the galactic intellect on display here I forgot I had to add a cutout for the plug too I'm still amazed nobody called me out last video for selecting the biggest stupidest possible package for the i o expanders this time I swap them for the much more sensible tssop package making the board even shorter and tossing another coil of Shame on my pile of parts to use someday the single most requested feature on this project has been magnetic Pogo pin connectors so Merry Christmas you filthy animals The Mirage is not a wireless board so you can't just like cleave the board and Twain and keep typing either way these are optional and you can just Bridge the SMD pads with solder if you don't understand how magnets work the flashiest Edition is what's missing he said not ironically but oxymoronically the Mark 1 had OLED display buttons but they were more crackable than clickable the Mark II got an e-ink touch screen but it was both awkwardly thin and way too wide onboard displays have always been the mirage's most distinct feature and while cutting them is the objectively correct decision it was a hard pill to swallow so I spat that pillow on the ground and I made a display module that's right LG's and C's these are not just hot swap macro Keys they're also hot swap module sockets the display module packs the same 2.7 inch e-paper touchscreen that I used last time but these stacking headers raise it to a comfortable height and because it can now hang off the edge of the board you can detach it if you want a smaller footprint I took the opportunity to add an ergoblood backlight a linear resonance actuator and a haptic driver for realistic clicky feedback at least this is where the haptic driver would be if digikey had one I actually made three modules and the other two were selected by a survey in the Mirage newsletter if you want to keep up with the project and see the nitty-gritty inside baseball stuff that I can't make an interesting video about sign up in the pinned comment keyboard spam only I pinky promise I'm going to sandbag those last two modules to increase my retention metrics now remember we want to string together an infinite number of Standalone keyboard halves each with their own backlights i o expanders and now modules and we only have four wire cable to do it last time we discovered this little bastard actually has two I squared C interfaces so if we configure its last two pins as an i squared C peripheral and if we're okay with putting a separate microcontroller into each half each board's neighbor can read it like a fiddle but I was not okay with that since day one I've had an ironclad uncompromising and increasingly irrational fixation with putting exactly one microcontroller in every Mirage no exceptions the time had come to face My Demons so I procured a bulging bag of a notoriously potent plant that's legal in Colorado I ingested a heroic dose and I lapsed into a trance-like state not talking about the Jazz cabbage I'm talking about Hatch Chiles I lost myself in a smothered burrito induced capsaicin hallucination to confront the trauma I had repressed of configuring compiling and deploying multiple instances of qmk onto my Infinity ergodox's multiple processors that's why I could never use multiple microcontrollers this cycle of abuse must be broken suddenly the burrito part of the smothered burrito took effect and I realized that my fears too were nothing but hot noisy air The Mirage was never going to run qmk it was going to run voltaic the voidstar lab totally adaptable interface for keyboards and I've been designing that specifically seeing Never After recompile firmware after you change your key maps that's my new name for the Mirage firmware and I'm still porting it from circuit python to C plus plus so there's nothing to announce except the name but come on it's a really cool name tell me how cool voltaic firmware's name is in the comment section below the like button so now each half gets its own independent gel RP 2040. seed Studios influencer marketing team must be flogging that simultaneous flossing and pogging I fired up Fusion's vastly improved cam processor generated Gerber files shipped them off to an unsustainably cheap overseas Fab house and then made a very uncharacteristic move getting other people's opinions I sent out a survey to the over 7 000 people who signed up for the Mirage newsletter and the results revealed that I had made a huge mistake the survey's primary goal was to figure out which modules to build first so I loaded it with spicy ideas like Bluetooth a breathalyzer Nixie tubes and a trackpoint style mousing device but the overwhelming winners were macro keys and coder knobs and Sliders these were suspiciously normal still the people had spoken you already get macro keys for free so I now had my next two mods to make first the knob mod I can't really read the mirage's i o expanders fast enough to capture uh quadrature encoder signal pulses but now that I'd overcome my fear of redundant microcontrollers I just plopped in that Mega on there dedicated quadrature decoders exist but they actually cost more than the Arduino and this replaces the eeprom every Mirage module is getting an onboard memory chip so it can identify itself and Store settings on the module itself I immediately ran into a problem the module sockets blocked clickable and ergoblood encoders pins but throughout this journey I had made more than just mistakes and bad keywords I made friends there's no point having friends if you don't sponge them for free MK Ultra keyboards bailed me out with a massive care package bulging with esoteric key switches fancy space themed keycaps a rainbow of their signature razor thin chalk dealios and their brand new oversized Mouse mats this one is perfect for the wannabe Dana Scully in your life I normally don't do shout outs in return for products but when I open this bag of buttery smooth momoka frog key switches something sprayed in my face and now my lips are moving on their own but the important part was in these silicone jars and it wasn't dank dabs it was rare low profile encoders and custom anodized knobs for them these don't just have shorter shafts they have hollow shafts and who really needs a haircut and has a bag of LEDs that sit flush with a circuit board this guy I've been where the knobs block the ergablids I made poo encoder modules in jabroni the second most requested module was sliders and I went a smidgen too far big surprise I know I gave each one a row of ergoblads I added another co-processor to read them the rp240 doesn't have great um great analog oh and I topped it off with an optional OLED welcome to voidstar lab where our modules modules get modules sliders impose some interesting requirements on the firmware since they stay in one of many states instead of being either temporarily pressed or not it's good to have all this information now as I structure the voltaic project so I ordered even more circuit boards and I went back to the survey data because something was really chapping my cheeks here's the situation early in the project I chose to orient the key switches so the LED is at the 12 o'clock position this is called North facing switches and it's standard for most you know most keyboards especially ones with LEDs if you install shine through keycaps with translucent Legends this will usually place the light directly beneath the letter for maximum retinal stimulation there's really only one reason to use south facing switches Cherry profile keycaps as bizarre as this sounds the Cherry company that invented the MX switch originally intended them to be installed upside down and their first party keycap design will collide with the housing if the switches installed logo Side Up Cherry profile caps are kind of of old school they've been almost entirely supplanted by the similar OEM profile almost entirely gmk keycaps are a status symbol among keyboard cognacenti and they're still made in the Cherry profile for that old school look the people who buy them tend to think shine through caps are low-brow garbage and they only will buy a keyboard if it has south facing LEDs I didn't really think they were the target market though like I've never mentioned this board on any subreddit form or Discord or just anyplace else you'd find keyboard enthusiasts because I figure The Mirage is low profile goofy displays i o expanders lack of thought and pretty much everything else would get me flamed to hell and shown the door the type of dabblers who watch my channel generally are not the type who'd spend 215 dollars for the privilege of waiting 47 weeks for a set of keycaps it looks like something an 80s business guy with Hoover a sniff off of North facing was the Clear Choice or the translucent Choice am I right the modules people wanted seem to have the same features as some recently hyped keyboards in the mechanical keyboard community on top of that 15 percent of respondents weren't planning to use the ergoblads at all and a third would cut them to shave twenty dollars off the cost other questions about the ortholinear layout and opinions on 3D printed Parts revealed that there were way more serious keyboard nerds in the audience than I expected the skills were tipped in literally in the wrong direction if I didn't rip up this brand new board spin those switches around and redo it people were not going to buy the keyboard I shipped the groupers back to the unspecified overseas Fab house and why not get the solder stencil with the right side locked down I started on the left they might look like mirror images but they're not the left headphone jack still needs to be in set this pushes the gel microcontroller right up to the upper right key switch the module sockets also aren't mirrored and that made this much more of a challenge to Route it took me a few days to do the left side but routing six boards in six weeks had left me pooped and in my vulnerable state I allowed myself to get sidetracked making PCB art not only did I place my order too late turns out when you pay a Fab house 25 bucks they're less willing to put up with dozens of sharp edge cutouts a hundred overlapping drill hits multiple megabytes of silk screen and a poorly worded rusher Quest so the board got delayed a week and I could not get it done in time for this episode but remember both boards now have independent microcontrollers so we don't actually need the left side to make it a complete keyboard you could say that in its current state The Mirage is all right my solder stencil turned out to be a tiny bit bigger than expected I think I might have specified a hundred millimeter border instead of a 10 millimeter border but the Mark III turned out to be much easier to assemble than its predecessors even with a capacitor on every led the i o expanders are easy to solder you just throw a blob down and drag it across and the rest of the parts have these big fat pads that make it really easy to solder this thing quickly this is going to be a great first soldering project for you know you the Mark II had so many problems I didn't bother making an enclosure for it but this time I had no excuse I Uncorked my prototyping Scotch imported both boards into Fusion's 3D workspace and proceeded to grind out the absolute sloppiest model of my entire career this enclosure is so it doesn't know how fast it is everything breaks when I recalculate the design at some point I passed some sort of business Event Horizon because every attempt at fixing anything just ruined more and more I had to go back in time with the versioning system just to salvage something I could print but it all got done the tray has tons of mounting bosses to handle left or right boards as well as their modules the support plate mounts to both the board and tray to improve the stability of the 3D printed parts and this detachable mini plate lets you clear the wafer modules we got boards we got modules we got enclosures we've got everything we need to build gosh darned mother hugging keyboards so to sum it up the Mirage is moving forward way faster and way better than I expected and by the time you watch this my radical viewers of the near future the left half should have arrived and I'll be hard at work you know throwing some parts on that refactoring the enclosure and rearranging the modules I forgot to mention before but when I turn the switches around that shifted the sockets for the modules up a little bit now they don't line up wasn't worth fixing for this episode but I don't know perhaps if you join our newsletter you'll see everything fit together nicely of course thanks to the fusion 360 team for supporting voidstar lab as well as writing a really good CAD suite for Rapid Hardware development more info in the description but do you know what's better than hammering kale box Shades until your co-workers cold coffee with a fire extinguisher our patrons folks like lab scientists red winds techers and Teflon cover our Preposterous development costs and let me give away everything we design as free open source The Majestic beacons of generosity we call collaborators include command creality online store Karen Houseman Castor the catboy and introducing schleppy the schwagster hey there Zach from the future here my favorite part of shooting these videos is stifling my snort laughter as I try to read your spicy usernames but this time the spice was too spicy the sponsor's legal team refused to sign off on the video and we've been going back and forth for over two weeks as I fought for your right to call yourself I don't want to have to shill predatory games and scam-tastic crypto to make ends meet and that means the occasional hard decision to keep good partners this time I chose to preserve a relationship with a company that serves the maker world and whose products I personally use in the future I'll ensure that sponsors understand that the spice must flow and if their lawyers are less lenient of last dab level labels leave my Looney Legion loads of leeway to lay down a line less loaded with legal liability I have made a very special Ducks cut for my patrons to view that doesn't have any of the sponsors branding and I promise to thank all the missing supporters in my next video even those who understandably pull their support that video features one of the most important projects I'll ever build but no spoilers thanks for your support thanks for watching and enjoy some mechanical keyboard ASMR

Channel: Zack Freedman

Views: 341,427

Keywords: DIY, zack friedman, zach friedman, zach freedman, voidstar lab, voidstar labs, diy projects, mechanical keyboard, mirage keyboard, split keyboard, ortholinear, cherry mx, choc key, rgb keyboard, hotswap, pcb design, product design, electronics, invention

Id: EWWJ1x2VMJs

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2022