Holy moly it's been a while and I've been staring at this keyboard every day wanting it to be done already!
Turns out, the body has cutouts for RJ9 connectors on the back, and even though I thought I was ahead of the game by ordering extra TRRS cables and jacks months ago, they left a big gap in the back of the case and that bothered me. I can be quite particular when the mood strikes so I waited (... and waited...) for RJ9 connectors to arrive from China.
Once the right parts arrived I was ready to finish this badboy! The schematic had 3 wires, and the jacks had 4... so I figured, "a wire is just a wire*, right?", and snipped one off. Then I proceeded to solder both halves the exact same way and flash the micro controllers.
TADA!
- Except when it's a wire that you need.
Much to my dismay, I discovered a bit too late that my RJ9 cable was a crossover cable and soldering both halves the exact same way meant that they weren't the same at all. So I had to desolder, replace one of the jacks and put it back together. But thankfully that was an easy solution and was quickly sorted.
I did my best to keep the wires neat and insulate whenever possible to avoid shorts but I wasn't happy with having an open bottom on the board. I was going to mock-up my own to print, but I was pleased to find that there are now STLS in the Dactyl repo for the bottom plates! Yahoo!
ALL DONE, FINALLY! Woo!