deskthority

There's not that many blank PCBs, maybe 8 BS, 4 BS-DW and probably another 8 Solenoid Driver PCBs. If you're going to get them made preassembled, then it wouldn't make sense to use my blank PCBs, as the price will likely drop dramatically the more you get preassembled.

However if you were set up to ...

I wouldn't be freaking out too much, (China-based) PCBWay write English like these guys but they've delivered all my (small-quantity) boards on time and haven't scammed me yet

PCB Assembly. PCBs are just the bare boards, no components, nothing soldered. Very important of course but not a lot of use on their own PCBA is the full board with components soldered on, sometimes tested etc.

PCBs are one thing, PCBA is another. Plenty of places do small-quantity PCBs (OSHPark, Seee(eeeee?)d Studio, PCBWay etc. Small-scale PCBA is a bit different, there are a few popping up now but they tend to cost rather a lot the smaller the batch is unfortunately.

Wow, would you look at this! Nice job. It's open source for a reason :) Now people just need to start hacking the code :D

Unfortunately my time for keyboard stuff is in very short supply and will remain this way for a while to come. Although I do need to build some sort of ergonomic split or ...

Who is using a Beamspring daily? How are your (kind of longtime) experience?
Me and good :)

I start feeling carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms when I use a Model F or any other keyboard that isn't a beamspring (or 7-row Thinkpad keyboard). This may however just be keyboard Stockholm syndrome (my ...

Looks quite sleek without those dividers. Although they don't really interfere with typing they do clutter up the visuals somewhat—not necessarily a bad thing, but with them missing the keyboard now looks a decade more modern. Lovely job

Cheers guys! I feel a bit embarassed winning this twice. Thanks for all your help and feedback producing them. I'm glad people are getting use out of them and it's great to see people now going off and manufacturing these on their own. Good thing Cindy keeps finding new boards, otherwise these ...

My F107 doesn't have any spacers/gaskets, the plates are just bolted together through the case. It does mean you have to be a little careful with assembly to align the plates with the case, otherwise (as with the beamsprings) you can have keys rubbing on the case.

I haven't converted mine yet, no ...

Thanks for the mention but I won last year! The Model F controller was just a rehash of the Beamspring. I nominate the XTant.

For ARM USB stacks (along with rest of libraries etc.), check out libopencm3. It's LGPL, not BSD, but still fine for most purposes, even commercial. It's under fairly heavy development but the bits that I've used are very high quality, although you might occasionally need to read some source code to ...

Those Sparkfun solenoids might not be such a good idea. Unlike the IBM solenoids, they have a very long throw, so there'll most likely be a noticeable delay when they activate. The IBM solenoid clickers only seem to move about 1mm or so. Also, the IBM solenoids hammer themselves against their own ...

xmega is a very different architecture than the plain old mega (as per DT's beloved Teensy). They're (partly) 16-bit and the registers are completely different. They're also 3.3V.

I struggle to see the point of them to be honest; if you're going to have to adapt to a new architecture (and move to 3 ...

That's one of the biggest frustrations I have whenever I sit down in front of an OS X machine; the repeat rate is so slow . Of course you can probably adjust it somewhere, but man! It always makes whatever I'm using feel like a laggy piece of crap.

I like a fast repeat rate and a short delay. xset ...

Nice job!

Why was it that you couldn't bolt it into one of the tabs? Was the ribbon cable just bending too much? They usually go in OK... but the ribbon cable normally enters through the top of the controller, like the original controller. Well played on putting the grounding points in, I see you ...

Go controller, go! You can make it!

Beautiful work quantalume. I wish I had your patience and attention to detail (not to mention tools! That clamp is nifty...).

Are the Model F plates not gold passivated like on the beamsprings? Cheap bastards!

You think they'd do something about keying that female header though (or using colour-coded wire) to stop connecting it up wrong though; I didn't see the red dot but if it's on the device itself it'd be pretty hard to trace it back through twisted wires?

That speaker thing is intriguing, I remember seeing it on photos of Kuato's board but I thought nothing of it and must have though it was part of the mechanical assembly of the case somehow. 18 ohms is a bit low for the solenoids (they are 30–35 ohms I think); the interesting thing is that that ...

Holy balls, is this someone we know? He certainly has good taste, although his prices may need a bit of negotiation (unless people really want a Kishsaver or 77-key beamspring!):

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-IBM-Keyboard-Model-F-50-Key-/161447496845?pt=PCA_Mice_Trackballs&hash=item2597054c8d ...

So my cow-orker (who madly decided “this is the keyboard I'm going to use today”) took the thing and started mapping usable keys onto it, an exercise which has proved reasonably frustrating, mostly because of the lack of a spacebar.

However we got to wondering how many keys it had; not being very ...

You know (at least with LUFA) relatively easily if your microcontroller has enumerated and is functioning over USB. If it isn't, you default to PS/2.

The electrical interfacing if you want to share a connector and pins is somewhat interesting, but not impossible. You may be able to just hook ...

And you could see your crappily-soldered and twisted through-hole electrolytic caps through the otherwise ultramodern case.

Yeah I was looking at some similar stuff, but just actual physical switch contacts to wire in rather than USB. I was planning to hook it into my ibm-capsense-usb controller, which has a few GPIO leftover for this sort of thing (although I'll need to write some more code to handle it).

Hmm... which ...

Yeah those were just rough examples of the kind of thing I was talking about. You could probably find something that'd match your specific requirements if you looked hard enough.

I think it's simple enough (and significantly more flexible) to just use a standalone microcontroller, rather than a ...

I forget the exact one that I've seen mentioned here on DT before (and read about indirectly here —interesting approach), but this and this are the kind of thing I'm talking about. I think they're normally referred to as a Keyboard Encoder. A very common solution to this day; you can get by with a ...

There is kind of charm to the slightly uneven pressure across the board causing pitch-variations in the pings. I'm assuming that's what causes the pitch-variations; that would be one explanation to why my F122 is particularly musical (larger plate etc.).

If you were to bolt mod, wouldn't you still ...

Wow, only just discovered this thread. So chuffed! Well done everybody! Really glad I didn't just convert my boards in isolation and forget about it :) Very, very cool to see all of this old machinery back in use again.

My own boards are tired and scuffed-up unloved things compared to the effort ...

Very typical 60s construction, not sloppy at all for the time. Old vintage radios are turds (on the inside!).

That's freaking fantastic. I've been looking at pedals lately, to experiment with as mod keys... the shite ones I was looking at just went out the window! Please tell me you have a box of ...

If I had to guess, maybe their defined range of products wouldn't include the Unicomp. If they're doing a gaming-related roundup, everyone wants NKRO, even if they don't need it, so the Unicomp doesn't qualify. Or maybe it's not reliably sourcable in Europe.
Well if you need NKRO for gaming then ...