Silenced vs Standard Topre Switch Keyboards

[Khers]

While the general go to substance seems to be lithium grease, I guess you could use vaseline. What you want should in principle just be a high viscosity greasy substance that stays in place while limiting friction. The only point of worry (by no means limited to Vaseline though), is whether the lube has any short or long term effects on plastics and, specifically with regards to Topres, rubber. Ideally, the lube should not be in contact with the domes, but in the cramped space that is the innards of a keyboard, this is difficult to avoid with at least some evaporation of the lube happening with time. The only issue I can see with using Vaseline is that it could potentially be more prone to picking up dust than a silicone based grease. I can't verify this though.

I do have at least a mirror less camera, and I do want some new glass for it. I will buy something as a christmas gift for myself. Guess that a macro is probably not ideal as a first prime lens though, especially since a nice one is so darn expensive for the system I've chosen (Fuji X).

[Hypersphere]

@Mu, thanks for the pics of the NT internals.

Regarding Vaseline, this is petroleum-based, which is to be avoided for anything coming in contact with rubber. Not sure about the plastics and metals in a keyboard. However, a petroleum grease would be a mixture of hydrocarbons with varying melting points. The synthetic silicone/teflon lubricants intended for keyboards might be preferable, but I don't have any data to support this. Some people use Lithium or Molybdenum grease for keyboards. WASD Keyboards throw in a small tube of SuperLube PTFE grease with their Barebones keyboards. I think the WASD grease is similar to EK MechLube2 -- these products are deemed suitable for lubing stabilizers in keyboards and I would tend to use these rather than something like Vaseline, but again, I have not seen comparative data.

[Muirium]

Lithium grease? Good stuff. I use that to lube ball bearings in bike wheels, and may well have some left over. The NovaTouch's rattle isn't likely as easily fixed, but when I'm next in there with some Cookie rings, I'll investigate. I still reckon the real noise in that particular board needs more dampers.

We need a better name than SLR for "fancy, proper, real cameras with interchangeable lenses". Mirrorless cameras are great. If I was buying a body today, I'd consider them. Not sure how well Canon's stacks up against the rest, but my lenses would demand me give them first refusal. Anyway, beyond the old Canon and Nikon duopoly, I know next to nothing about individual lenses. The principles are still the same, though. A long prime can masquerade as a half decent (but fiddly) macro with an extender tube. While a macro is an expensive kind of general purpose prime which comes with a close focus superpower!

[Hypersphere]

Lithium grease? Good stuff. I use that to lube ball bearings in bike wheels, and may well have some left over. The NovaTouch's rattle isn't likely as easily fixed, but when I'm next in there with some Cookie rings, I'll investigate. I still reckon the real noise in that particular board needs more dampers.

We need a better name than SLR for "fancy, proper, real cameras with interchangeable lenses". Mirrorless cameras are great. If I was buying a body today, I'd consider them. Not sure how well Canon's stacks up against the rest, but my lenses would demand me give them first refusal. Anyway, beyond the old Canon and Nikon duopoly, I know next to nothing about individual lenses. The principles are still the same, though. A long prime can masquerade as a half decent (but fiddly) macro with an extender tube. While a macro is an expensive kind of general purpose prime which comes with a close focus superpower!

ich bin ein dummkopf probably in general, but especially when it comes to optics. So, are there DSLR cameras that use a prism instead of a mirror? What about Olympus -- do they count?

[Muirium]

Well, veering into a typical DT style tangent!

This is the kind of mirrorless camera we're talking about.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorless ... ens_camera

They aren't SLRs at all. The viewfinder is gone, so you have to shoot using the screen. This makes them way smaller and lighter than big old SLRs, though, and the crucial part is they can still use the same lenses. That Canon there needs an extender to take regular EF series lenses, which loses some of the portability advantage, but it does make for an exceedingly useful little camera that can play with the big boys' glass when necessary.

The mirror vs. prism thing is a separate distinction between SLRs. All of them have a mirror behind the lens. But small ones like my 350D (Digital Rebel in the US) use a second mirror in the viewfinder, which is compact, while full body cameras like the 5D use a prism up there, which gives a much nicer, brighter and bigger image for you to compose your shot with. Crop cameras like my little 350D squeeze in a dinky little flash thanks to the space saved by omitting the prism. Full frame SLRs are all solid glass up there, so have no integrated flash at all.

[Hypersphere]

Regarding cameras, I am waiting for a portable device that will decode impulses from my visual cortex and record the image that my eyes are seeing on a flash drive.

[Muirium]

You know about the macula, right, and how our eyes are actually quite poor image sensors, while the images we see are the result of lots of processing in our brains? Cameras are higher bandwidth than our own eyes. Try reading without moving your gaze across the line and see what I mean.

Such a device would yield images more like this.



Actually, it's way worse than that. Humans are colour blind outside of the central sweet spot of the macula, so most of our field of view is monochome and very low resolution, filled in by our mental software!

[Hypersphere]

@Mu, yes, this is why I would want the image as processed through all the stages of the visual system, with the final touches provided by the visual cortex.

[Muirium]

Philosophical question. Is the image we see really an image at all? I doubt our brains have an XY grid or even the concept of pixels once the processing is complete. Rather, I suspect our sight is as immaterial, and ineffable as a dream.

So it might be a while until we come up with a file format!

[Hypersphere]

Good question. When I was in grad school, I took a neurobiology course that had lab demonstrations. The instructor had prepared an animal whose gaze was fixed on a screen, upon which could be projected lines or edges between dark and light areas. The angle of the line or edge could be rotated precisely. The animal's visual cortex was exposed, and a single neuron therein was impaled by a microelectrode connected to an amplifier with an output to an oscilloscope and a speaker. This particular neuron responded only to a line at a specific angle. When the line was rotated away from the specific angle, you could hear the speaker reporting random blips, like a Geiger counter registering background radiation. When the line on the screen was rotated to the specific angle that the neuron recognized, the speaker sounded like heavy rain on a tin roof as a steady train of action potentials was set off. And as soon as the line was rotated just a fraction of a degree away from its response point, the speaker went back to random blips. That demonstration made a vivid impression that I have never forgotten.

Thus, the "image" that is "projected" onto the brain consists of zillions of discrete components, such as lines and edges between dark and light areas. "Color" presumably arises from responses of neurons whose processes can ultimately be traced to retinal photoreceptors that respond maximally to certain wavelengths of visible light. All this information is integrated to yield what we interpret as an image of the world. Sense data made sensible by the associative and integrative processes of the brain.

It will probably be a while before I get my Neuroflex camera!

[Khers]

I got around modding my HHKB a bit earlier than expected when the evening opened up today. I even remembered to grab some photos of the process. One of the things that I found was that while only part of the spacebar stabilizer was lubed on my Realforce, all stabilizers were lubed on the HHKB. Even so, the points where the shift and return stabilizers click in to the plate were not lubed so I ended up lubing them a bit.

Anyway, the main reson for todays little project was to do a silencing mod to the HHKB, along the lines of fellow swede huttala, by dressing the sliders in some dental elastics.

First of all the caps has to come off. The the three screws on the bottom plate are to be removed. The PCB is then, as is the case with all Topres, held in place by a small army of screws. The switches are then free, and the stabilizers can be lubed, as indicated below. Note that this is the before pic and that lube was already applied from the factory at the top position.

Spoiler:

This time I had to remove the sliders from the switch housing. It was actually a lot easier than I initially thought. I just took a screwdriver, in this case a fairly small hex nut, and pushed gently from the top of the slider until it was free. I also grabbed a photo of the sliders, somewhat akin to the one Mu showed previously in the thread.

Spoiler:

Then came the tedious work of putting the very small dental elastic bands on the sliders. I got the elastic bands off ebay. They are of the 1/16" soft variety if I remember correctly. I can check that tomorrow if anyone is interested.

Spoiler:

As you might imagine, this took a while. Many of the elastic bands are now scattered around my apartment, but I eventually got rather ok at it. Putting it all back together was easy. The end result it perhaps not quite as quiet as a silenced Topre, but neither does it seem to have altered the feel of the switches. At the moment my RF87 is at work, so the final judgement will have to wait until tomorrow. For now I give you a photo of my current, temporary, desktop.