The Helix. More keys, more lights and more fun! This was a great build because I had half the parts I already needed.
I tried building this board a while back. But the PCB had bad traces, which resulted in a few broken keys. I had a more self inflicted problem like that on my Levinson. However, I was able to fix that with some good old fashioned hand wiring. I didn’t want to do that on my old Helix so I trashed it and built this new one!
I did make one big mistake during this build, and that was desoldering all the old WS2812B LEDs from my old board. At the time, I didn’t want to spend the extra $30 to buy the additional 20 LEDs. I thought It’d be easy enough to desolder the old LEDs and reuse them on this board. I chose poorly. It would have saved me countless hours working with angry solder if I’d just bought new ones, because the temperature has to be relatively low on these LEDs it makes the solder a huge pain to work with. The LEDs will burn out if solder is over 230 degrees Celsius.
I used Gateron black silent switches and I like them a lot! They have a really nice subtle, due to the silent option, chonk to them. Also, this board features hotswappable switcheds and microcontrollers. If I ever need to replace the microcontrollers I can just pop them off. The USB connector on them is known to break off. In fact, this happened on one of my other boards and I ended up having to desolder the microcontroller and it was a nightware.
The keyscaps aren’t perfect yet. I ran out of the blue ones and threw an old blue one I had laying around from my Levinson build. I got the caps from PimpMyKeyboard. They have great coloring, dye sublimated legends and are true to colors posted on their website too. Couldn’t be happier.
All and all, I like this board a lot. It was a fun build that I had some unfinished business with from the past broken PCB build. I finally got that itch out of my system. I still have one more dream build in my system though. The keyword is, wireless.