And production previews of what it will really look like

@Den-Fi Sorta, I have a private Github repo and a living To-Do document that I use to keep track of most of the things that need to be done.

A brief history: I started by trying to get some basic functionality done on a normal arduino (detect when two pins are connected) but quickly got bored and decided to put that off until later. I got to work picking components that I wanted to use, and started putting together the schematic. After that was mostly done, I switched over to 3D cad to design a rough idea of what the case will look like, as well as the footprint for the PCB and layout of all the switches. Once that was done, I made a dxf file of the "pcb" from Fusion 360, imported into eagle for the footprint of the whole PCB. From there, I moved the switch components to the exact location of the holes to get the keys placed properly, then last Friday, I began running all the traces evar. Literally like 20 hours of work went into stitching traces across the board to get everything connected. Next on the todo list is to get the pcb made, order components, work on a slightly custom board definition for this microprocessor, probably based on either the Arduino Zero or some Adafruit SAMD21 board. Then, write all the code. I've thought about using a premade firmware like QMK, but I don't want to use it because I want the challenge of writing my own, and I have no clue how to setup the MCU to be compatible with QMK.

@bob345 you would probably appreciate this.

Will the fab lab solder in the SMDs or will you do it yourself?

@Dissitesuxba11s JLCPCB and others do offer that service, but I don't think they have a lot of the components in stock that I want to use. Plus I like soldering  

Nice, I do too. I was looking at making my own custom 65% PCB a while back but a lot of interesting group buys started popping up so abandoned the idea. I might pick it up again when I get the time. 

@Dissitesuxba11s it's a lot of work. If I wanted to just use a pre-made firmware, it probably wouldn't be too bad of a project. However, the pcb is still a lot of traces to pack into not a lot of space. It was quite a challenge for a novice like myself. 

Nice looking layout! Ive been wanting to do something like this for a while too. What EDA are you using? eagle?

@bob345 Thank you! It was a pain in the ass to fit the mcu between all the switches, and then run ALL the traces in that tiny little space.

Yeah its Eagle. I learned it because the only other EE at my lab used it, so we've standardized to it as we've made more boards and brought on more EEs. That and Autodesk's student program is awesome. That being said, we're not too happy with Eagle's various quirks and steepish learning curve. We've briefly tried KiCAD, but 4 crashes in 30 minutes for me was too many, so if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.