The examples I have laid out are fairly simple. I have gotten domesday duplicators made along with multiple arcade sticks and trackball PCBs (for complicated boards, you may need some soldering and assembly done at the factory). But of course, this goes beyond simply making cheap keyboards. Alternatively, you can support one of the many fine keyboard suppliers. If you got a keyboard, you are going to need keyboard parts, so it makes sense to order those on AliExpress at the same time so they get there whenever. When it arrives, it’ll come vacuum-packed in a little box and be ready to solder and assemble. It’s definitely a premium, but it’s very handsome, and you can do some very neat stuff with it. OSH Park, for example, offers a beautiful black “ After Dark” PCB with a clear solder mask ( the polymer applied to the top of copper traces - this means you’ll be able to see the copper under it). I love a board that pops, so I tend to go with Blue FR4 with a white silkscreen or White FR4 with a black silkscreen, but the options vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Depending on who you buy from, it should generate a preview where it’ll show you what the board looks like and give you several options for materials, number of layers, colors, and more. When you are done, just zip the files up and upload the compressed archive to your manufacturer of choice. If you are ordering from JLCPCB specifically, there are actually handy plugins for JLCPCB and PCBway that you can use to simplify the entire process. When you are done, you are going to want to generate your gerber files using KiCad’s fabrication options. Place your silk on a relatively clean and empty part of the board or get creative - it’s design! To preview how the board is going to look, you can open up the 3D viewer in KiCad and rotate your board around. This is handy if you want an image on both sides of a board. If you want the silkscreen on the other layer, press “F,” and it will flip the silk to the other side of the board. The layers you are going to be editing on are usually called “F.Silkscreen” and “B.Silkscreen” for front and back, respectively. If you see something that looks like “G***,” double click your silkscreen and select properties, then untick “visible” to make that part of the footprint invisible. If your silkscreen is too big or small for the area you have selected, refine it in one of the previous steps and try again. You can use the filter up top to quickly narrow down your choices to the art you just generated. This brings up all the “footprints” in your library, which includes any silkscreens you may have previously generated. Once your PCB is loaded up, you are going to press “O” or click the “load footprint” button on the right-hand side of the toolbar.
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