 In today's episode of Linus Tech Tips Home Isolation Edition, we are going to take these plain old boring keyboard keycaps and infuse dye into the surface of them to make our very own full color custom keycaps. All you need to do this is a converted inkjet printer, a homemade heat press, some sublimation paper in our hand left, and a little bit of patience. This is going to be my first time doing it, so let's hope that Colin's instructions are extremely clear. SimpliSafe is the effective and affordable home security service designed to keep your home safe. Head to simplisafe.com forward slash ltt and stay tuned for more info coming later on in this video. Dye sublimation is the process of printing a dye onto a transfer medium, then with the application of both heat and pressure, infusing the dye into the surface of a receptive material. This process is commonly used to print onto mugs, clothing, phone cases, and much much more. And with a little bit of work, you can take an everyday inkjet printer and some dye sublimation transfer paper. Oh, apparently I already have that one. How convenient. Note that if you choose to convert a secondhand printer, guys, there are some extra steps involved. We went new and we chose the Epson WF-7210 because it's relatively cheap and there were ample choices for dye subconversion kits on Amazon. Time to set it up, I guess. I have no instructions for this, so, whoo, good luck. The most important thing, though, is to not run the stock cartridges at any point, because then it's a used printer and now you have to do those extra steps. This looks and feels extremely cheap. Refill ink hole is this. This is so stupid. These don't even have screw on tops. This just like rams on there. That's not amazing. Wait, oh shoot, that's not the, oh, that's the air hole. Oh shoot. I have one job. I have one job. Put the thing into the correct hole. See, you knew I wasn't gonna be able to handle that. All right, hey, one down. I think it's the size because normally the black ones are bigger, but I don't think it actually lets you fill it all the way. Okay. We got us a printer, ladies and gentlemen. Printer, ladies and gentlemen. Probably like that, I guess. Would I screw up something as simple as loading paper in a printer? Well, would I screw up something as big as marrying someone who doesn't know how to put paper in a printer? No. Now that that's over with, we can get to printing. So I've actually got a sheet of designs from our very own one and only macro king, Taren Van Heemert. Apparently, this is just one of the many that Taren has requested. So there's gonna be a lot of trial and error here. I guess it doesn't really matter which design we start with. Why does he need a band key? Like band hammer? I don't know. So while that's printing, guys, you can take a break and visit lttstore.com. Oh, who's a hater now? All right, let's have a look at our size here. So these are supposed to be 11 millimeter by 11 millimeter, which should fit pretty nicely onto our keys. We didn't go right to the edge. We left a bit of a border, but that was on purpose. Now that that's done, I will finally go through the press that Colin made. So the construction is pretty simple. You've got two pieces of wood, small hinge, a heater element right here, and then a power supply. For the aforementioned here element, we also used some high temp JB weld to hold the heater in place. And basically, all that's involved is you take this puppy, put it this way and then apply pressure. When you've got both heat and pressure, the ink should soak into the key cap permanently. On instructions were doing pretty well until now. I'm supposed to remove this silicone from this plastic strip, but they seem to have bonded fairly permanently. Nope, this is not coming off. Fine. I guess you're getting the axe today. This was the only other silicone thing that I could find in this building, unfortunately. Now we just need a piece of this that is about the same size as our key cap printout. The silicone goes on there. Apply pressure for 50 to 60 seconds. Apply pressure for 50 to 60 seconds. Geez, that is a long time. Okay, here we go. All right, let's have a look. We got nothing. Let's try that again. Absolutely nothing. I have an uneasy suspicion that this ink is not dye sublimation ink at all, because I would have expected it to transfer at least a little bit so far. As you guys can probably tell from the improvements to the lighting, skill with the camera, and beard, some time has passed and I am ready to pick up again with DIY custom key caps, this time with the correct ink. You want the Minecraft head or you want the Minecraft block? Head. So we need to take our creeper and we're going to put it on top of there. That's a play down. Yes, so that's the whole point. The ink on the top is going to get soaked into this plastic right here. So it needs to be upside down. Can you count to 60? One, two, three, sixty. Woo, that is pretty cool. All right, so there's our Minecraft creeper. I don't know if it needs to cool down to be durable, but it seems fine right off the bat. The idea is that the ink actually soaks right into the plastic, so it shouldn't be easy to remove. Daddy, can you stop please? Stop what? Stop rubbing it. Stop rubbing it. Why? I'm trying to test it and see if it's going to come off. It's not coming off. Impressively, the color is actually better after you sublimate it. So you can see our white key cap is a much more vibrant green than our white piece of paper here. Okay, let's do the little cute face. Wow, that's really good cutting. One, two, three, nine, sixty. Okay, do you think it worked? Yes. Oh, that's adorable. Just like the creeper, the dye is sublimated into the key cap material, so it does not scratch off. That is super cool. I've only done about half a dozen of them so far, but I've already learned quite a few things. Number one is that more pressure seems to mean that you can get away with less time. Number two is that dye sublimation definitely doesn't work on dark key caps at all. Not only did the images not transfer particularly well, but we actually found that they melted more easily from the heating element. And then the other one is that if you don't get a full transfer, you can actually kind of peel it back a little bit, put it back on, and then give it another go. That was how we fixed the LTT logo one. If I were to design this heat press again, one thing I would probably change is to elevate the hinge a little bit, because right now what I'm finding is compared to just doing 40 seconds, which is what I've settled on now with more pressure, I kind of have to do 20 seconds one side, 20 seconds the other side in order to get an even application. Now that I've got the hang of it though, they are coming out incredibly well, as long as it's a pretty simple design on a light-colored cap. I'm gonna take another crack at this Batman one. You can clearly see I didn't put enough pressure on it. Let's check this Minecraft block, shall we? Hey, how's that look? Pretty good, hey? Do you guys want to take another crack at the Batman key? Yeah, please. Well, we can do that together, but I think I'm done talking to the audience, so that means it's time for our sponsor. SimpliSafe is designed to protect your home like a pro. So they offer 24x7 professional monitoring, they offer 3.5x faster police dispatch, and SimpliSafe's alarms receive the highest priority police dispatch. Their security specialists will provide real eyewitness evidence to the police department, and they can even protect your home both inside and out. Their video doorbell and HD cameras alert you to anyone approaching your home, and their smart locks and entry sensors guard the perimeter. They've got motion and glass break sensors, privacy protecting cameras to provide another layer of protection, and PCMag named them their editor's choice. It costs about 50 cents a day with no contract. One item we'd like to highlight is the SimpliSafe lock. It's designed to make sure that your door is locked even when you forget to do it, so it'll automatically lock on a timer or whenever you arm your system, and what's cool is that it unlocks through a pin pad and it'll disarm your entire system when you do that. It'll even help you keep track of who comes and goes with alerts when anyone locks or unlocks your door. So check it out and learn more at SimpliSafe.com forward slash LTT. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our recent video where we showed off the only all-metal keyboard, as far as we're aware. That's right, all-metal body, all-metal keycaps even. We're going to have that linked down below.