Lylyk #

This is a custom mechanical monoblock keyboard design project for KiCad 8.0 and up, heavily inspired by Atreyu. Supports ProMicro-sized boards (tested with 0xCB-Helios). In Ukrainian, «лилик» (lylyk) means "the bat". You can probably see why the keyboard has been named like this. Below is the image of the initial prototype. Version 1.0 has some adjusted cuts for the board slot, removed mounting holes and re-arranged tracks, but otherwise keeps the same outlines.

Rationale #

Although there are a plethora of custom open-source mechanical keyboards around, as usual in such cases - none of those I have found were able to fit my requirements precisely. Initially, after a long search, I stumbled upon the Atreyu board, by Jesus Climent, and tinkered around adjusting it to my needs. In the end, I went on reworking it almost completely, keeping only the overall design similarity and most of the key positioning.

In general, I did not want a super fancy and expensive board, with tons of options I, personally, would never use, for example:

• Bluetooth is an overkill for something that is supposed to be sitting in one place on my desk, nevermind the battery hassle, and you would still need to connect a cable if you wanted to enter UEFI/BIOS.

• Fancy underglow LEDs are very distracting for any focused work, and otherwise having them present, yet turned off, would be just a waste of money.

• Hot-swapping sounds nice in theory, but is almost never needed, once you find what type of switches you prefer. And additional soldering efford, not to mention added costs for getting hot-swap sockets, is just not worth it.

• OLED screens are rather useless overall, not giving the bang for the buck.

• Any cases or cover panels are pricey, yet of little value, if you design the board in a way that makes them redundant.

As you can see, I was looking for something very simple, sturdy, practical and cost-efficient, while at the same time providing the ergonomics of a columnar-staggered monoblock, programmable layouts, and most important - at least 60 keys, to cover for most of the needs of a multi-lingual person like myself, without requiring to constantly shift between the layers over the layers to get the needed symbol. Also, nice aesthetics would not hurt here either.

Last, but not least, I wanted to focus on Cherry MX Low Profile switches exclusively, due to their perfect suitability for thin keyboards, without sacrificing key travel too much, contrary to even thinner switches trending as of late. As for the keycaps, I would be targeting the DSA profile, or in future, even smaller custom 3D-printed caps.

Finally, the board needs no case or back/front panels, due to its components placement. However, some sticky rubber bumpers at the back of the board are strongly suggested instead, depending on one's preferences.

Footprints #

Lylyk uses modified versions some Keebio-sourced footprints:

Cherry-MX-Low-Profile

• borders resized to accommodate the DSA keycap profile
• holes have reduced diameter for a more tight fit of the switches

Elite-C-castellated-29pin

• adjusted to represent the 0xCB-Helios board
• only SMT soldering supported
• removed pads unused in Lylyk
• contact pads resized for easier soldering

Production #

You can find the Gerber files here. They have been initially tweaked for JLCPCB manufacturing, but you should be able to use them with any other PCB manufacturer out there without any problems. Just compress/zip them and send to your manufacturer. Should you encounter any challenges, you can always generate your own data files from the project itself, although you will need KiCAD version 8.x to do that.

Assembly #

There are no illustrated guides for the time being. However, the keyboard was designed with minimalism in mind, so here are literally the steps you need to follow:

• solder 60 SMD diodes to the back side of the keyboard, minding the proper directional positioning (north-facing)
• solder 1 Helios board to the back side of the keyboard, through castellated pins, with the board components facing top side
• solder 60 switches in place
• put keycaps onto switches and connect the USB-C cable
• flash the firmware (see next paragraph)

Firmware #

Lylyk's firmware is built with QMK. The changes have not been upstreamed yet, but you can find the keyboard definition here and the actual firmware binary at this place.

Push a small reset button on the Helios board for 500 ms and you will enter a bootloader mode, allowing to mount the board as a removable disk. Copy the .uf2 firmware file to that mounted disk, to flash it.

License #

Unless overridden explicitly on a per-file basis, for 3rd party sources, this project is distributed under the terms of BlueOak-1.0.0 license.