68keys

A 68-key keyboard with per-key RGB, Kailh hotswap sockets, and USB-C. Uses Blue Pill.

History

This keyboard was inspired by the 68keys.io keyboard. The 68keys keyboard has a similar layout to the MagicForce 68. di0ib did a replacement PCB for the Magicforce 68.

I love the Magicforce 68, but wanted a few changes. As a colossally disproportionate response to this challenge, I created a utility that generates PCBs from arbitrary KLE JSON files, and used it to create this keyboard.

A note about backlighting

I wanted my per-key RGB keyboard to have a dim backlight on all keys, but didn't want to sacrifice cool RGB matrix effects to have it. So I wrote up a QMK patch that treats RGB(0, 0, 0) as eligible for backlighting. Unfortunately the QMK maintainers weren't interested (actually, now that I look back, I didn't submit a pull request, but rather discussed it in a chat room), so it's not upstreamed. Thus you'll have to add that patch (and this) to your copy of QMK and then enable it in config.h and rules.mk.

Building and flashing

qmk flash -kb sowbug/68keys -km default