South facing LED

Why are most custom boards coming with south facing LED’s? Do you know how difficult it is to find key caps that light up the key legend? I have spent a couple of hours searching for any key caps and have only found one set for ordering.

Is there a technical reason for not designing the board with north facing keys?

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Yes, not all keycaps are made the exact same shape and size. A few standards for keycaps that are highly used for enthusiasts don’t work well with north facing switches such as Cherry style Keycaps. Which sucks for a lot of people, but you are right South facing does make RGB a lot harder as most shine though keycaps sadly even including glorious’ own are centered at the top for North Facing switches. Either someone will have to make a very big redesign to keyboard pcbs to have south facing switches but LEDs that still shine through normal shine through keycaps or companies should start making more centered shine through keycaps. cough cough glorious please hurry up and do it.

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I have found one set of side printed keycaps that are available, just one. Maybe i should go and setup a group buy and design them myself. Seems like that may be the only way to get what I want.

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If I remember correctly, the main reason most custom keyboards have south facing LEDs is due to the design of Cherry profile keycaps aswell as keyboard switches - north facing keyboard face the unfortunate issue of interference between the switch and the (Cherry profile) keycap.

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I love this idea. I would get behind a nice set of shine through keycaps for southfacing LEDs.

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South keycap legends would be amazing. I have turned some keys round and they work really well with the south facing switches. Why doesn’t anyone make these?

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That’s the word I was looking for profile. It was on the tip of my tongue. Also to add on depending on the keycap set they can either just not work on some keys or not fully bottom out or hit each other when attempting to do so.

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I still love my GMMK PRO, but why is the south facing LED thing STILL a thing? GMMK, you have the means to deal with this. Years later and here we are.

Hey @zaphod welcome to the forum!

As has been mentioned above, for the most universal switch compatibility with Cherry keycap profile (which is one of the most popular), south facing LEDs prevent from interference where the keycap on a particular row will not fully bottom out. There are some switches that prevent this from happening. But if you want the most consistent experience, south facing switches are the to accomplish this.

I think the main issue is keycap producers who have shine through keycaps predominantly on the top part of the cap instead of the bottom or even a middle solution that might accommodate both.

I don’t believe a north facing LED PCB will be released because of the reasons above.

Hopefully that answers your question. Sorry that it may not be the answer you were looking for.

Thanks for the response. I think the community is still in search of south facing shine through key caps being offered by GMMK for a keyboard manufactured and sold by GMMK. There should be a set of south facing Pro Key Caps we can buy directly from GMMK.

The great debate… South vs North / Shine Through vs Not.

I probably have this conversation at least every other week with a friend of mine as he likes his RGB and can’t understand why keyboard manufactures keep making South facing PCB where shine through keycaps don’t work. Me on the other hand, don’t really use shine through, if were to do so it would be pudding or polychroma type keycaps for the full effect and not truly impacted by south facing PCB.

I will say I put the polychroma keycaps on my GMMK 2 65% and they look… very pretty.

While that is North facing, I will say they would look good on either side. It’s incredible.

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It would be nice to have at least the option to get a north racing pcb for the gmmk pro

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I am glad I stumbled upon this topic. I am very new to building keyboards. Just did my first a few days ago. So all this talk about north-south, switches, shine thru, pudding, cherry, PCB etc is all things I am quickly learning about! WoW! I read all the comments here and thank you all! It definitely helped me to better understand all these terms and how they affect things. My first build is a GMMK Pro with Gateron Reds (linier) and Aura v2 black pudding caps. I did notice that even though the keyboard is RGB, it is still hard to read the letter on the keys.

At least now I have a better idea of what to keep in mind when key shopping.

Thanks,
Missinde

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