deskthority

As someone who built a custom battleship, I think there's merit in matching modern norms.

I built mine with the express intent you could use a cheap and available standard ANSI-104 keycap layout and then just cover the rest with scraps. It also means that the arrow keys and editing block are ...

An alternative might be waterslide decal pinstripes. Or you could even buy blank decal paper for a dollar or so per sheet and cover it with paint, then use a guillotine cutter to make long perfect pinstripes. I did this recently for a model which required long pinstripe decals but did not include ...

I did the counter functionality in my own firmware almost two years ago. It's a keystroke counter, but realistically, I've never broken one million keystrokes before either the host machine got powered-off or the OLED decided to lock itself up.

Probably terrible idea: One of the things that makes the Model F hard to deal with on a hobbyist basis is the curved aspects-- a curved PCB, the curved sandwich plate, a case to accomodate the curve, getting all the tolerances right, dealing with foam to pack it all together. Without fancy tools ...

I think some of them mount like an old laptop SIMM-- there's pins on the casing that restrain where the controller can fit, and little levers that snap over the board to hold it in place.

I managed to damage the membrane on mine, expanding the holes so they didn't align perfectly, but was able to ...

The way it's phrased, it sounds like the same person owned Video Display and Ordway.

If it was the same, why are they charging their own company rent in the first place? I wonder if it's an accounting or tax game, moving around losses and forgiveness to create some number palatable to an outside ...

My personal choice of controller directly influenced the capabilities of the board. When the Teensy++ went out of production, I switched to the WCH CH32V305, since it was offered as a comparatively cheap through-hole breakout with a similar GPIO count, and offered the (then) novelty of being RISC-V ...

I'm sort of surprised that my cavalcade of HID devices never gets any attention from the security team at work. The firmware on my keyboard identifies as a 'qmkbuilder Overton130', and there are two different trackballs hanging off.

I suppose that's part of the reason I haven't swapped in the newer ...

My experience with a large custom board, on EasyAVR and possibly QMK, was that the random cheapo KVMs I used didn't like the NKRO modes. They would work, but it wouldn't sniff the "type control-control-2 to switch to the other machine" for example. I wasn't really testing some of the other devices ...

Bold move to mention a specific trademark when describing the lubrication - I assumed companies did not make direct comparisons with named competing products. I was wrong?

Does this mean 1 ms, or do this mean "probably 1 ms, but if you set set the debounce protection to less than 5 ms in your ...

Okay, after slopping the unit down with alcohol and poking at it for 20 minutes, I feel like I'm stuck in a "you're holding it wrong" loop.

The rolling mechanism is nice, but I can't figure out placement. I sort of want to treat it like a Trackpoint, although obviously with way more play, but the ...

Today at the junk shop I found two things I was in need of: a set of ~3.5kg dumb-bells and a complete-looking-in-box RollerMouse Free2. While it looks like it had limited use before being boxed back up and discarded, I want to clean it off from the shop of who-knows-who sneezing and coughing on it ...

I just saw the new F122 desig. I really like how it embraces modern layouts for editing and windows keys, rather than copying the 1984 design.

The top left badge opening with the drill hole makes me think very much of my current board which has an encoder in that position. It would be an ...

I'm concerned about the lack of stabilizers on the shifts.

I'll just say that's a remarkably forward-thinking product design from Unicomp.

Although the execution is a bit surprising-- at a commercial scale, you'd think they'd go straight to soldering a RP2040 microcontroller down rather than having the extra cost and complexity of the carrier board.

What I'd actually advise is Soarer's Controller . If you know his Converter, his Controller is all that plus the easiest to use keyboard controller software I've encountered. Excellent documentation too. I've used it a bunch over the years and it remains my go-to for (non-capsense) controllers ...

I have one board with Box Navies; it did stretch the caps I put on it (Domikey SA sets)-- they fit too loosely on the other board with Box Pale Blue and tend to pop off.

I have a container of Box White v2 waiting for a new PCB, and I don't know what to expect.

I know at least one keycap design ...

The purpose was "I had spare PCBs that were designed for a Teensy++". By mounting the nanoCH32V305 to the interposer, I can mount to a board I already have handy.

This let me prove that 1) yes, enough GPIOs work to drive a full 130% board and 2) work out some of the software and scanning weirdness ...

Spending two minutes playing with footprints in EasyEDA shows it might be doable, but a tight fit. Basically, the footprint for the MCU is large enough that pins extend to the Teensy++ pin footprints.

clearance issues.PNG

Possibility 1: Modify the footprint with shorter leads. Not sure if this ...

It feels like for small keyboards, there ended up being a fair number of different controllers that had a Pro Micro analogous pinout. There was never a standard for larger ones. I suppose you could basically design a CH32V305 breakout with a "native" Teensy++ style pinout, but that's more surface ...

Personally, I’d like a break out for the USB pins so you can attach your own socket without having to bend an awkward USB C cable through the tight internal confines of your case and PCB geometry. Often, the hardest part of a controller replacement for an existing keyboard is the damn USB cable to ...

I feel like I'm a bit of an anomaly in the "modern" mechanical keyboard scene. When most people are building 40%, 30%, single switch boards, I've latched on to a 130% layout and keep dragging it through revision after revision. It features an incredibly naive matrix design that's 23 rows x 7 columns ...

I ended up using a handful of canned macros. As a lark, I was considering trying to develop a macro which generated dynamic content (i. e. a random number fitting certain range constraints) but the use case suggests I'd be better off with a fixed constant.

You might want to cross-check with some of the less keyboard-enthusiast and more vintage-computing crews.

There's a lot of interest in those Nabu machines now that a hoard of them has been released into the wild; there's probably someone who has one and wants a spare keyboard.

That's not the audio company logo. Maybe it was a middleman distributor or local retailer. You used to see a lot of stickers on CPUs/mainboards/expansion boards from the retailer they were bought through for warranty tracking, these would often be marked for date of sale.

I was intrigued when you mentioned the 'Technics logo on the back'? As in the fancy audio division of Panasonic?

One would think they would have no need to outsource to random Chinese keyboard firms. Though there might be some historical excuse-- some of the larger-capacity CD changers have a PS/2 ...

Matias tried to appeal to the enthusiast market with their Alps line being fitted in modern layout keyboards, but you still hear about people buying original Alps boards and not even using the modern Matias switches. The only real selling point the modern Alps has now is getting 200 of the damn ...

But the problem is that this is not product designed for the general public, this is an enthusiast product.

By the time someone is seriously considering dropping half a grand on a computer keyboard I don't think concerns over layout accessibility for a keyboard that you can't even use in your ...

If I had to go for a non-fullsize, I'd want a SSK-style layout.

The thing is, the layouts of boards like the 4704 Model Fs make sense within the use-cases and software designs they were paired with. Love or hate it, a modern keyboard is likely being paired with a Windows/MacOS/modern UNIX system ...

I can agree with that.

I finally went back to Matias switches, and went with the Tai-Hao Cubics not out of a specific preference, but because they're about the best-available for new-stock Alps caps. They look like what you'd get if you asked someone in 1989 to draw what a keyboard would look like ...