It depends on what you'd consider "expensive", for mine the keycaps were £25, plus the keyboard itself (Epomaker EP84) was £21 secondhand. I think you'd be starting at £150 if you were to design one from scratch, and that's at the low end.
Oh definitely. I had to go with an RGB keyboard and some generic keycaps for this build, but it definitely was a compromise. Otherwise the keyboard would have been more expensive than everything else combined…
I was recently using this project. It outputs over serial which is handy for capturing a longer stream. I’m working on a wire wrapped 6502 machine and was getting a weird issue where I could see via the Sync pin that it was mis-executing a byte of data as an instruction instead. The fix was to add another decoupling capacitor next to the CPU…