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Comment by sleepybrett | Hacker News Reader

at the cost of what per key? Congrats your removed all the efficiency from the system.

People are willing to spend quite a lot on regular old mechanical keyboards.

But yes, just eyeballing that it's going to be hard to get it below $5/key and probably more like $10 for the first run.

The key's circuit by itself is probably a few tens of cents, I can't imagine the rest of it being that expensive

OP confirms $6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239398

For reference, my heuristic for circuit price estimation is

    - passives and little SMT things are free
    - anything electromechanical ~$1: switches, connectors, in this case the pogo pins
    - fancy connectors up to $10 (ZIF sockets, RAM sockets, etc)
    - normal ICs $1
    - BGA or fancier ICs: check digikey or guess $10-$100
    - board area is "free" for small boards (up to hand-sized)

Is that for a certain order size? Because a lot of the cost can come simply from retooling or swapping components. Like if you have 100 x1 smt components vs 1x 100 smt components it's a huge different if you get what I mean. Also anything through hole I basically just give up getting assembled as a hobbyist.

you know what a spool of wire, a reel of diodes, a peice of plasticcard and a hobby knife (for a switch plate, assuming you don't have access to a 3d printer or laser cutter), and a rp2040 costs? Because that's all you need (aside switches) to build any size/geometry of keyboard you want.

These per switch pcbs are conceptually cool but just kinda stupid, there are tons of people selling these single switch pcbs without the magnets/pogopins out there.. people try them out and then decide that they are pointless.

Pogo pins are expensive. Somewhere around $0.15-$1 per pin. This design has four pairs of two pins. So just the connectors are over a dollar per key, possibly multiple dollars

That's fair, I didn't take that into account. I wonder if some alternative design that doesn't use them is possible

Inductive coupling could work for both power and data, but probably not at high enough power levels to have LEDs per key if you want to go through 10+ keys in a row...

Oh i've spent a lot prototyping keyboards, the pcb quite often one of the cheapest bit (if you even bother with one).

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