How To Design And Build Your Own Keyboard

About the project

In this tutorial you will design and build your own keyboard. You will also learn all the essentials to design and build any electronics.

Project info

Difficulty: Easy

Estimated time: 1 day

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA version 4.0 or later (CC BY-NC-SA 4+)

Story

This project guides you through designing your own custom keyboard, from the initial concept to the final product. Even if you've never designed anything before, this tutorial will show you how to:

draw schematic
design a custom PCB (Printed Circuit Board),
design a box / case / enclosure
order and manufacture PCB, Assembly, 3D Printing, CNC

Throughout this project, you'll gain essential skills for designing any electronic product. The end result will be a fully functional keyboard you can use daily. The keyboard is highly customizable—you can modify key shortcuts, create macros, or adjust colors directly in your web browser.

This project is open-source. All necessary files are available on GitHub and other linked resources (mentioned below):

Finished project (EasyEDA): https://oshwlab.com/robertferanec/custom-keyboard
Github (HW + 3D + SW): https://github.com/FEDEVEL/custom-keyboard
Thingiverse (3D): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6784228

Software apps and online services used in the project:

EasyEDA - https://easyeda.com/

VIA - https://www.caniusevia.com/

QMK Firmware - https://qmk.fm/

Video Tutorials

To help you follow along step by step, here is the complete series of video tutorials that walk you through the design and creation of your custom keyboard. Each part focuses on a specific aspect of the project:

Part 1: Schematic - RP2040