PCB Keyboard Build Guide

Sip socket Installation

You just insert them into the side of each switch like so, and pull them together slowly. Make sure you have them pushed in all the way, or else both sides won't come up.

Pretty simple process. I find that if you start releasing the pressure with the tools as soon as both sides are up, the spring and slider will stay in the bottom housing, instead of coming out. This is because the top part of the housing plastic pinches together while you're removing it and grips the slider enough to pull it out, too. This is why I release the pressure early, and just the top will come off!

As you can see here, the spring and slider are just chillin' there, and that's fine. Better than having them fly all over the place, which will happen if you're not careful! If you do happen to mess one up and it goes flying on you, remember that the metal leaf in the bottom housing, the protruding legs of the slider and the text on the top housing all align with each other.

You know your boy didn't forget the LEDs! I'm going to be using SIP sockets for this, too. For those of you that aren't familiar with them, they basically get installed into/through the switch, then soldered to the board, in place of the LED itself. Then, you clip an LED down (more on that later) and just slide the LED into the SIP socket, effectively making hot-swappable LEDs!

So, the MX HHKB plate supports switch-top removal, which means we can remove the tops of the switch, to have access to the internals without having to desolder the switch! This is super convenient for a number of reasons, including lubing, spring swapping and SIP socketing. These little tools make it much easier to remove the top of the switch. They cost about $7 from mechanicalkeyboards.com, and they have paid for themselves several times over by now.

Note: Not all plates support this feature. If you try it on a plate that doesn't, you might end up breaking a switch or your plate.

So, I just push the SIP socket into the bottom like you can see here. There are little holes at the bottom the pins fit through. They can be a little resistant, so you have to use a little force here. You want them to go in there until they won't go any more. I use either the tip of my index finger or the tip of some tweezers.

We're gonna use the flush cutters again and clip just above those little notches on the wires. They're way easier to see in person, I promise. I marked the notches in black, here.

Now that it's clipped, you can take some tweezers to hold it, and go through and check each SIP socket, to make sure all of them have been soldered in correctly. I forgot to take pictures of soldering them in, but it's just like the switches, just with smaller holes. EZ-PZ. Do note the orientation of the LED does matter here, so if it doesn't light up one way, flip it and try again. The orientation of the SIP socket does not matter. Add all of your leds and you should be good to go!

Big shoutout to /u/quakemz for the writeup.