Joe Scotto's Scotto69 "Nice Edition" Keyboard Ditches the Hand-Wiring for an STM32-Powered PCB

The hand-wiring may have gone, but there's no mistaking the design as anything other than a Scotto original.

Gareth Halfacree
2 months agoHW101 / 3D Printing

Open-hardware keyboard designer Joe Scotto has released another 3D-printable keyboard design, the Scotto69 (Nice Edition) — and this time has broken with tradition by designing a custom printed circuit board rather than wiring all the switches by hand.

"Recently a friend of mine wanted a board from me," Scotto explains of the keyboard's origins, "and we worked together to land on a layout we both liked. The board is called the Scotto69 and it's a traditional 4×12 ortholinear layout with a numpad on the right, five macro keys on the left, and an option to add a [rotary] encoder. The board also features a magnetic bar on the back to give it a 5° typing angle."

The Scotto69 (Nice Edition) is the latest 3D-printed mechanical keyboard design from Joe Scotto. (📹: Joe Scotto)

Where previously Scotto has designed his keyboard such that the mechanical switches are held in place in a 3D-printed framework and wired to the microcontroller by hand with flying leads, the Scotto69 opts for the more typical approach of mounting the switches into a custom PCB — designed in KiCad and hosting an STMicroelectronics STM32F072CBT6 microcontroller running the QMK firmware.

Scotto's earlier, hand-wired keyboard designs include the ultra-thin ScottoWing, a one-handed input device inspired by the Frogpad,the unusual-layout ScottoKatana, and the ScottoDeck — the latter designed as an Elgato Stream Deck alternative and boasting eight programmable keys and two input knobs — alongside a battery-powered Bluetooth-connected wireless keyboard dubbed the Scotto63. All have been released for anyone to make under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

The Scotto69, though, is only partially open: while Scotto has released design and 3D print files for the keyboard's housing, stabilizing plate, and keycaps, and precompiled firmware for the microcontroller, he has not released design files for the PCB — instead making it available to purchase on his web store at €54.95 (around $61).

More information is available on Scotto's website and in his Reddit post; the 3D print files and firmware are available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles