Jeroen's Project Journals

KLEPCBGEN is short for “Keyboard Layout Editor Printed Circuit Board Generator”. The Keyboard Layout Editor is a web application that lets users design their own keyboard layouts:

It has been around for quite a few years by now and it is used by mechanical keyboard enthousiasts to design their own keyboard layouts, often for the purpose of turning such a design into a real, physical keyboard. Creating the PCB for a keyboard by placing each key-switch individually is very tedious and error prone though. For that reason I created klepcbgen, which takes a layout file from KLE and turns it into a kicad project with a completely connected schematic and a PCB layout with the switch footprints placed correctly:

I actually made my own keyboard with this tool, which I still use to this day (I made identical ones for my kids too):

The design is available as an example application of klepcbgen, as is the accompanying 3D printed case.

This is actually my most popular OSS application so far with over 320 stars and 42 forks. This is still modest compared to other projects of course.