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
50 M3 Screw 5mm $ 1.91 R$ 11,89* 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 🚀