A popular meme pokes fun at the DIY mechanical keyboard community by suggesting that enthusiasts must surely realize significant savings by building their own keyboards rather than purchasing a commodity preassembled unit,

whereas anyone who has ever even dipped their toe into that rabbit hole knows that this is typically far from the case. Rather than toss some keycaps, switches, a board and a case into a shopping cart and whacking them all together, however, PJRC forum user stefan.jakobsson took things to the next level with a scratch-built, Teensy LC-based 60% keeb.

We’re not sure what switches or caps are in use here, but the plate is 3d-printed, and the matrix is hand-soldered, dead bug-style, rather than using a PCB. A bespoke 1.5 steel plate forms the bottom case. Custom firmware, written using the Keyboard class, supports a standard layer plus second Fn layer, and has a simple built in debouncing handler. Source code is available in the thread, although Stefan is still working through some issues with sleep mode.