Pros: Little screens on every key!
Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!
Get one today!
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Art Lebedev Optimus has entered the chat.
If there were cheap, open source, resin 3d printers with an open slicer, I would be tempted to design a keyboard that uses light pipes and 2-4 LEDs per key to make something like this. Many early electronic display devices worked like this. Like some of the early Apollo program hardware NASA used were just little incandescent bulbs barely more than a Christmas lights. These were angled and projected onto a plastic lens with specially angled facets on the back that created a pathway for one of eight bulbs to create a numerical display. Fran's Lab on YT tends to show off stuff like this. It should be possible to make a similar light pipe design for multiple key backlights.
I would probably get too side tracked in making printable mechanical keys.
if the one i saw on fran's lab was any indication, your keyboard would have to be about 10cm thick.
That was for the limitations of incandescent lights, plastics, and mold manufacturing limitations of the era.
Printing would be a question of the optical properties of the resins. It is common to find simple light pipes with 90° angles in products now. Worst case scenario, I would make it a two piece design where the lower body accepts small fishing line. Typical colorless fishing line is basically a fiber optic wire without an optical design specification. So just insert that to route the digits for each key. It would look like an old school HP alphanumeric dot display. Glue the line on the back side of each key with epoxy, then use a carefully designed raser jig to cut/terminate each line. Finally, add a printed lens diffuser.
I haven't messed with resin and it probably would not work, but if a jig to remount and align keys to the resin printer plate were possible, I could see skipping the second lens diffuser, scuffing the surface of the top of each key before attaching each strand of fishing line, and then printing the rest of the key over top of the strands so that the light is only passing through the semi opaque plastic with no indication of character without the backlight. It would be interesting to mix my experience as a pro automotive painter & graphics/airbrush artist to mess around with aesthetics of a resin applied in stages and intermediate surface finishes. A UV cured resin cannot be all that different than the stuff I am more familiar with.
Hey... I've seen this one... 20 years ago as vaporware
No, they actually made it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard
It was crazy expensive and from what I remember it was making a sound when turned on.
Yeah I remember seeing one like it back then, but this is a new, open source 'knock off'