World’s 3rd Keyboard With Built-in DAC – Made By Me – Wooden Case
Building custom keyboard cases from wood has been a passion for me for the last 6 months. Before that, I was buying Aluminium mechanical keyboards, which was a joy back then. But lately I realised that a real “custom” keyboard should be more than buying the case, switches and keycaps and building it, like the rest of the world. In my book, custom means “unique”, meaning that nobody has it other than the owner.
As the headline states, the first mechanical keyboard came 2 years ago from an audio company, Moondrop, with the model name Dash in a 75% layout with their Moonriver dongle DAC built-in. The Dash had an aluminium case.
The second model, KB3, came from FiiO, another Chinese audio company, which I reviewed here and modded the non-HiFi version here. The KB3 was also a 75% layout, with FiiO’s KA13 dongle DAC built in. It also has a USB hub with two USB-A ports behind. The KB3 has a plastic case with an aluminium metal part on top.
I used Moondrop’s Dawn 4.4 dongle DAC in my build. Because it has the smallest PCB and high-quality sound worth using in my build. It has the same dual Cirrus Logis CS43131 DAC chips used in the FiiO KB3. Not so far from the Moondrop’s Moonriver dongle DAC, which uses the slightly better CS43198 chips.
The idea was simple: to use a USB-C hub with two TYPE-C data outputs. But in reality, I couldn’t find such a device. There is not a single product on the market wich serves my needs. But I was lucky enough to find the closest option, a Type-C USB hub for smartphones with two USB-A data output lines.
I had to use a Type-C female to female and two USB-A to USB-C adapters to make it work, also to carve the case to fit it under the keyboard PCB. Here is how it looks:
I used 4 silicone spacers to mount the PCB on 4 corners, and 4 shorter ones in the middle of the case to give the PCB a gasget mount style elasticity while typing.
The PCB that I used came from Epomaker’s Shadow-X model. It was the only my favorite FRL TKL layout that I could find on the market, and I was lucky enough to get it for just $38 with a discount.
Besides my desired layout, the rest is kinda ugly. A plastic case with rather thick borders. A useless, cheap LCD screen with an awful viewing angle, etc. That knob that you see on the right up corner is not a volume knob, its the mode selector for USB/WiFi/Bluetooth and its height unnecessarily high! What a bad design, sorry Epomaker! But a perfect candidate for modding!
But for my luck, the Shadow-X’s PCB is very interesting. It has holes for PCB-mounted stabilisers, so I was able to build a plateless keyboard this time. I know that to do this, we need soldered switches; hence, this is a hot-swap PCB. But I used 5-pin switches (Gateron EF Curry), so I managed to have that rigidity that I need while typing. I also used Gateron’s PCB-mounted stabilisers.
I used the PCB foam to support the switches, for both aesthetic purposes and sound damping. I like thocky/creamy and rather silent keyboards. So that was my goal.
I bought these MOA profile keycaps for this build because of the colours. I wanted a natural and organic, like wood, colour combo. Although my smartphone was not able to catch the true colours of the keycaps, they are light green on the Mod keys, dark green on the first (numbers) row, coffee milk colour on ESC, Enter and arrow keys. And very light yellow on the letters. Like some Autumn colours.
The wood I used is Turkish Walnut (two types of colours, for the body and the side panels), which matches perfectly with the coffee milk space bar.
Enough talking, let’s see the result 🙂
The 4.4mm headphone out, the best place I can think of for usability.
