So, my home mill will not cut a board larger than 4"x5", and this board is 7"x4.0". Furthermore, the only piece of FR4 PCB material I have left is 4.5"x6.5", so not quite big enough to cut this. I suppose I can split it into two boards with a nasty join in the center, but I don't have enough material of the right shape. Obviously, I can send out for boards to be cut, but it takes weeks to order from China (or super expensive from the US) and I generally like to cut and test at least one before I send out for them.

I looked around at quotes. Everybody loves OshPark! Let's try them!

They want $140 for my board.  That is a big NOPE! And I'm not ever sure shipping is included in that!

What about PCBway?

That's less than half the cost, and includes shipping! Much better! Delivery would take awhile tho.

Who else?

Folks like Seeed Studios. How are they?

That's like 1/4 the price of OshPark... but wait, no shipping. Assuming shipping is the same as for PCBway (~$20) then we are still 1/3 the cost of OSHPark, and $10 lower than PCBway. Can we do better?

Yes, yes, we can. Again, probably add $20 for shipping, but $46 vs $140? Yeah, this is probably as low as we are going to go.

But I still want to debug the board a bit before I blow $50, especially since I didn't have the client on board for expenses again yet. So I determined to cut the board in two halves on my Othermill.

I was out of PCB blanks, so I ordered some from eBay. But the first one I ordered from turned out to be on vacation and couldn't deliver quickly, so I ordered from somebody else for slightly more money. And then I realized a few days later that you really aren't supposed to use FR4 on the Othermill, only FR1. FR4 is fiberglass and not good to breath, and also supposedly bad for the mill. So I looked around for FR1 and determined that only Bantam Tools (the new name of Othermachine Co., maker of my Othermill,)  sells them, so I ordered those.

Finally, I got impatient and went to Fry's and paid way too much for some FR4 blanks and got it done.

It looks lovely, but there are already issues...

In order to split the boards, I basically had to copy the PCB file in KiCAD twice and then delete half of the board in each one. Trying to line up traces and footprints that go over the edge is pretty tricky, and I had to do a lot of hand editing of the raw text data to split the keyboard footprint properly. It seems that things got a bit misaligned in the process, especially for the two WS2812 that were split across the two layers, and for the bottom of the keyboard. I probably should have modified the border so that the LEDs wouldn't be cut in half. Good to know for next time.

Even worse were the mistakes on the bottom board.

The entire footprint for the processor was somehow deleted, and I didn't notice until I had cut half of the board! So I had to do a lot of janky rework to get it to the point where non-connected pins wouldn't short out. Furthermore, the connection for the stylus also seems to have disappeared. I fixed stuff up for the second half (on the left), but the right is a huge bloody mess.

Even after rework, there were tons of problems with this board.  The top LED just was not going to fit on it's pads. Some vias directly below that LED actually needed a wire soldered into them, which was going to cause problems for the LED. I didn't have the right angle headers needed to mount the Blue Pill microcontroller to the board, so I just bent some pinheaders, but some of the pins didn't quire make contact with the traces due the lack of large pads from the missing footprint. The speaker is just the right size to short out pins on the LED ring.

I'm glad I spend $50 sending out for this board....