Make A Wooden Computer Keyboard #ArtTuesday

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Steve M Potter made this beautiful wooden keyboard and tutorial to follow via instructables

I decided that I deserve a keyboard that I really adore, since I spend most of my workday at the computer. You can buy gorgeous office desks, chairs, wooden pens and beautiful stationery. Why is it that keyboards are all plastic and ugly? I always liked the feel and sound of the old IBM-AT clicky keyboards. These have the “buckling spring” mechanism that is very strong and never wears out. But aesthetically, beige plastic – Yuck! So I decided to take the mechanical and electronic guts of a clicky keyboard and install them into a home-made wood version. This turned out to be a long and tedious art+engineering project, and I will spare you some of the missteps I made, describing here what worked. In the end, I have a very solid, completely functional beautiful wood keyboard that I use every day at work. The keyboard even survived dozens of kids pounding on it at the Atlanta Maker Faire, where I had it hooked up to my laptop for people to try it out.

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There are many artistic or aesthetic decisions I made that you may not have, and which involved a lot of extra work, such as dyeing the function keys according to the resistor color code, or using Scrabble tiles for the letter keys. But these were important for me to really love it, and to think of it as an art project, rather than just a tool I use to type at work. If you do decide to make your own wooden keyboard, I encourage you to add your own artistic touches…

Full tutorial


Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!


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