Hike News
Hike News

【IC】Carbon fiber case (originally keycaps)

类型: IC
作者: ThomasLee
发布时间: 2020-12-09 16:23:24
更新时间: 2020-12-14 22:45:30
原链接: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=110114.0


Hi everyone,
I’m Thomas from ArmSoar, we do not currently make any keyboard parts. We make high end carbon fiber RC gliders for competition ( www.armsoar.com).
Essentially my brother was looking for some nice carbon fiber keycaps for a new keyboard but can’t really find anything. We saw some attempts that were posted online but maybe due to quality and processes I guess they never went into production?
Since we already have a professional composites facility in Europe producing carbon planes and UAVs, I figured if there’s enough interest I can spend some money on tooling, work out the prototypes and mechanics with my team and do a limited run.
This is a simple high level IC to see if there’s enough interest for this to happen. No specs yet (frankly, I’ll need the community’s help on that) but based on my research and quick discussion with the production team, we don’t see any technical challenges of making it.
These are the simple things about it that I do know:

  1. Keycaps itself will be fully carbon fiber, hand layups by a professional composites team.
  2. Most likely TKL format (although I can be convinced of having num pad/etc)
  3. Will most likely be an injection molded plastic stem inside the keycap. We can form it in one single piece in carbon, but that’ll be very very expensive. Most likely 2-3X the below price.
  4. Tooling, materials, CNC time and (high) labour time, I would say we’re looking at around $300-$500 / set depending on how many sets we make/sell. We’ll need 200 sets or more to make it happen. More sets = lower price, since we can split up a lot of the upfront design, tooling and prototyping costs against more units.
    Please let me know what you think, whether you would be interested, and any suggestions on specs (which switches to make it for, etc).
    We’re working on a carbon case. Will be back when we have prototypes :)
    Please join our discord: https://discord.gg/HYpJphw9wm
    Cheers,
    Thomas
,