search

foostan / crkbd

Corne keyboard, a split keyboard with 3x6 column staggered keys and 3 thumb keys.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
5.35k stars 957 forks source link

Corne v4.1 3x5 Chocolate with OLEDs #249

Open a-manumohan opened 2 months ago

a-manumohan commented 2 months ago

I am planning to build a corne with the following parameters.

I haven't seen any samples of v4 or v4.1 with OLEDs anywhere on the internet yet. The changelog from v3 to v4 mentioned continued support for OLED and I noticed the pin headers on the PCB. But I can't find a top plate GERBER with a cutout for OLED displays. 2 Given options are for mini choc corne and extended choc corne with the cutout for the additional 2 switches.

I do not know PCB design or how to work with kicard. So my questions is

Do you have any plans to add designs for a top plate that supports OLED?

brujoand commented 2 months ago

Just a warning. I tried soldering on OLEDs on the 4.1 PCB and it was crazy difficult. One board is toast. I would try to find a socket that jlcpcb can add if possible.

kijewskimateusz commented 2 months ago

@brujoand could you please elaborate about the difficulty of soldering the OLED to the PCB? I think it may be worth opening an issue to add socket for the OLED.

brujoand commented 2 months ago

@kijewskimateusz there are a couple of challenges, one being that I'm no expert on soldering.

First I learned that I had to trim the legs of the OLED PCB so that it just sit's a few of mm out from the through hole on the Corne PCB. If not then it's really difficult to get the soldering iron into an angle where it doesn't touch (and melt) the minijack.

The other challenge is that the connecting ring you're supposed to solder the OLED PCB legs to are so thin that it's difficult to heat them properly. This causes solder to only attach to the OLED PCB leg, and this is probably where I broke my board by over heating the PCB while trying to heat the connector.

I tried both with the stock tip and the smallest tip from my Pinecil soldering iron. Maybe someone will have better luck with more professional hardware, or better soldering skills.

Edit: Got a reply from foostan on discord:

Currently, there is no correct implementation for OLEDs. It remains for compatibility with v3 but I have not yet selected the parts. However, I can say that the same parts can be used as in v3. That is, parts like pin sockets can be soldered to the PCB.

ref: https://discord.com/channels/715899960327012423/742781449731702824/1251084760122523659