Monday, September 3, 2018

DIY Steno Hardware Spotlight: The Specter

User incognition on the Plover Discord completed a DIY steno machine project a while back, and I realized I never wound up featuring it here. Incognition has promised me a guest post with lots of details about the build at some point in the future, but in the mean time, here are a couple of morsels to whet your appetite. Incidentally, if anyone else has ever built a custom board, whether as a commercial prototype or as a one-off for exclusively personal use, I'd love to see it and feature it here! Nothing warms my heart more than a beautiful handmade steno machine.




The parts weren't very expensive. It's a knock-off Arduino, about 32 Gateron switches, custom keycaps and PCB, spray-painted and screwed into a piece of particle board. It took a LOT of time to assemble though, milling the PCB and hand-cutting the keycaps. I milled out one set of each keycap on a CNC machine, then made molds of those. The mold casting process still required me to cut all the keys to the right height by hand, along with an obscene (obsessive-level) amount of sanding and polishing.

What a gorgeous piece of work!

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