Looking for Open Hardware keyboards? Look here for a great example, they’ve got some pretty nice stuff going out there with mechanical keyboard designs!
So, a few noteworthy things are pointing out about this design. First of all, a large, rigid PCB is used to cover the full area of all the keys on the keyboard, rather than only being used for the microcontroller and relegating the lion’s share of the key surface area to be covered by a cheaper flex printed circuit with no diode isolation for n-key rollover. Second, the project makes use of a standardized USB Type-C daughter-board with protective electronics, Unified Daughterboard Project C3. Third, the keyboard microcontroller is AVR-based and uses a standardized keyboard controller firmware framework called QMK, and the keyboard itself it then just defined using some header file definitions for the pinout of the keyboard matrix and the key scan codes. And last but not least, I found the forum link to the great community behind this all, this is how they sync their communications with each other, and unfortunately there is clearly a broken link between this community’s communications and that of the 68kMLA community. Matter of fact, the Open Hardware design of the case came out of asking for permission from a member of this community.
IMPORTANT UPDATE 2020-11-05! All of the Bakeneko 60 keyboard project links are broken because there was a licensing issue and the author made all the projects private. The crux of the matter was that the part about getting permission to use the case, well kkatano didn’t really get permission correctly.
20201027/DuckDuckGo open source keyboard github
broken/https://kkatano.github.io/bakeneko-60/
20201105/https://web.archive.org/web/20201106054307/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AjyovCJb1zcQJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fkkatano%2Fbakeneko-60+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
20201027/https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=98587.50
20201105/https://github.com/evyd13/plain60-c
20201027/https://github.com/ai03-2725/Unified-Daughterboard
broken/https://github.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-pcb
20201105/https://web.archive.org/web/20201106054928/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AG2qMiDScY34J%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fkkatano%2Fbakeneko-60-pcb+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
broken/https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-pcb/master/images/bakeneko-60-pcb-top.png
broken/https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-pcb/master/images/bakeneko-60-pcb-bottom.png
20201027/https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/bakeneko60
20201027/https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/bakeneko60
20201027/https://docs.qmk.fm/#/
20201105/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xZdRO0GuuboJ:https://github.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-aluminum-case+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
20201105/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jMWURBqByAAJ:https://github.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-3dprinted-case+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
20201105/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bj1Cmmv6iGIJ:https://github.com/kkatano/bakeneko-60-fr4-full-plate+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Yes, these are some nice USB libraries for AVR microcontrollers! The first one is designed as a driver for AVR cores with hardware USB functions, the second is a pure firmware (software) implementation.
20201027/https://github.com/qmk/lufa/tree/ce10f7642b0459e409839b23cc91498945119b4d
20201027/https://github.com/qmk/v-usb/tree/bdb53e4c043d089279d9891b68bea77614cb97ee
20201027/https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html
Does QMF support PS/2 output? Apparently not, not without some hacking of your own. For the most part, it is designed exclusively for USB-connected keyboards.
20201027/DuckDuckGo qmk ps/2
20201027/https://www.reddit.com/r/olkb/comments/i2qsgi/qmk_ps2_output_support/
Mentioned in that discussion is this useful dual USB and PS/2 keyboard controller.
20201027/http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/79209.pdf
Okay, then I’m not going to even be asking about ADB support.
The plate, you talk about? What’s that? Oh wow, this is a great article about the plate from Keyboard University, what? Now that’s a thing too? Yes, sponsored by a custom keyboard group sales broker company.
20201027/DuckDuckGo keyboard plate
20201027/https://keyboard.university/200-courses/plate-materials-sizes
20201027/https://keyboard.university/
20201027/https://thekey.company/
Now, what is the story behind the term “group buy”? Here, it’s on Wikipedia, it’s an very common in China and other Asian countries but it has never really been popular in Western cultures. Relatively recently, it started to grow in popularity, mainly through specialized use in physical goods manufacturing.
20201027/DuckDuckGo group buy
20201027/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_buying
UPDATE 2020-11-05: Here is the inner scoop on the licensing problems with Bakeneko 60.
20201105/https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=107316.0
20201105/https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=107316.msg2975513#msg2975513
It’s also not uncommon for others to go around in the mechanical keyboard community having licensing issues, like this example.
20201105/http://www.40percent.club/p/license-violators.html
For the time being, I’d recommend looking at the list of open-source mechanical keyboards instead of the particular Bakeneko 60 project.
https://github.com/BenRoe/awesome-mechanical-keyboard
https://github.com/BenRoe/awesome-mechanical-keyboard/blob/master/docs/README.md