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Dactyl keyboard - Part 1
After build the Iris keyboard I decided to start a new quest to build a Dactyl-cc (as I mentioned at the end of the Iris post 😉)
Dactyl is the keyboad I wanted to build from the start but I certainly didn't have the skils to do it. I decided to first build a "portable kinesis", so I could take it with me when I was traveling and Iris seemed like a great fit for this and not that hard for a first project. Now that I have the skills, I will build the Dactyl to maybe take my kinesis' place.
This is the first post of a series about building a dactyl keyboard and we will focus on the parts I had to buy.
Where to buy
I decided to buy everything from AliExpress. It's usually cheaper than buying everything where I like (Brazil) and I not in a hurry, which is the bigger disadvantage of AliExpress.
Many of these parts I could easily find in a local store, sometimes even cheaper, but due to the pandemic I don't want to visit any physical store.
With that said, let's go for the list of parts I bought and the individual links (the advantage of buying everything on AliExpress 😄):
Required parts
It required a lot of reserach to understand what each of these do and why they are required, but here are my choices:
| Qty | Item | Total price | BRL (+taxes) | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 68 | Gateron Brown Sw | $ 17.57 | R$ 109,34* | AliExpress |
| 1 | Ergodox caps set | $ 19.90 | R$ 123,84* | AliExpress |
| 10 | RJ9 female | $ 5.10 | R$ 31,73* | AliExpress |
| 25 | Nut insert M3 | $ 1.58 | R$ 9,83* | AliExpress |
| 200 | IN4148 Diodes | $ 1.14 | R$ 7,09* | AliExpress |
| 2 | Wrist Rest | $ 5.60 | R$ 34,85* | AliExpress |
| 1 | Jumper cables | $ 0.98 | R$ 6,10* | AliExpress |
| 3 | MicroUSB to USBC | $ 2.97 | R$ 18,48* | AliExpress |
| 2 | RJ9 cables | $ 2.24 | R$ 13,94* | AliExpress |
| 20 | Reset buttons | $ 1.06 | R$ 6,59* | AliExpress |
| 135 | Hotswap sockets | $ 13.50 | R$ 84,01* | AliExpress |
| 7 | Colored wires | $ 8.82 | R$ 54,89* | AliExpress** |
| 2 | Promicro | $ 5.90 | R$ 36,72* | AliExpress |
| 1 | 2.0% flux solder | $ 2.11 | R$ 11,60 | AliExpress |
update: It turned out the M3 screw is not the right one and the wrong jumper cables were sent 😕.
Extras:
| Qty | Item | Price | BRL (+taxes) | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Testing Switches | $ 1.20 | R$ 7,45* | AliExpress |
* I bought so many things and bundled them together that it's now hard to find the exact amount of money I spent considering taxes, currencies, bundled orders, etc. To simplify things a bit I used the average currency exchange from my credit card bill to get all the BRL prices for these items.
** This item is open for dispute. For some reason the shipment was cancelled so I'm checking with the seller and didn't get a response.
Cost and ETA
Currently, it's a total of $92.50 or R$568,35 approximately. I would say R$600 would be a good guess because of the currency exchange flutuation. As a comparison, the minimum wage in Brazil is R$ 1045.
2021 edit: A friend of mine just bought the spare parts I had here for R$100. The final price for the keyboard was ~R$500 (not considering the huge amount of work I'm putting into it, of course 😉).
The average time to get something from AliExpress to Brazil is around 3 weeks and some of these parts started to arrive already 😃
Wait for more about this soon 🚀