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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • Agree. Skeleton Crew had very different ambitions, but I think it successfully achieved them. I think that Star Wars is at least slightly more than “just a setting,” but letting creatives with a good story to tell go ahead and tell it to Star Wars fans is the way to go. Favreau I think may be done after the M&G movie, and Filoni probably needs to be kept away from live action and be the animation guy plus the “spirit of George” Jimmy Cricket.

    The beauty of Andor is that the story didn’t HAVE to be a Star Wars story, but it was molded around Star Wars in a respectful way that enhanced both the show and the “universe.”




  • For the very basics of KiCAD, their own intro is helpful. I had to wrap my head around the workflow: first schematic, then PCB.

    Once you grasp that, some keyboard specific stuff is described by Joe Scotto in this video. He tends to rush his tutorials though, so best to go through the KiCad page first or revisit the video after.

    For resources, I found Ai03’s library of footprints to be perfect, except that his vertical 2U were not oriented how I needed them, which I realized too late, LOL. Then, the kbplacer plugin by adamws was absolutely invaluable and saved me so much time. I used JLCPCB, because even when US-China tariffs were at their worst (and goodness knows they could be again if Trump gets a hangnail or something), JLC was still the cheapest option for me.

    If you’ve never done a PCB before, I might humbly suggest keeping to a fixed layout for the first go-round. I did that on my first board and it worked perfectly for what I intended it to be. I got a little ambitious with this one, and ambition+inexperience+impatience led to a flawed project.


  • SKCM white. Both switches and keycaps (and the front feet, actually) came from a fried early-90s Focus keyboard that had a trackball where the arrow keys go, and the arrows were around it on mouse micro switches with little flappy “buttons” that are part of the case, also very mouse-like.

    For the PCB, lots of YouTube and searching Geekhack, deskthority, and (yes) Reddit to see how to use KiCAD for mechanical keyboards. Mine uses the “cheat” of mounting a Raspberry Pi Pico clone to the underside so I don’t have to know as much about electronics (that part actually went perfectly).

    The mistakes were two tiny bits of trace that got deleted but I didn’t see, and some placement issues for the Alps version that I had to work around. I have four of them left, so I’ll just use MX compatible switches and a normal sized spacebar for future builds and avoid the worst of it.