deskthority

This is actually the first I've seen that has the metal cover plate. My other boards from this area have an inset like that but it's just another plastic panel and not painted metal.

That retrobright turned out fantastic. I can't believe that thing cleaned up so well.

The sound difference is almost exactly what I remember from my two bolt-modded 80's IBM's vs my old 2007 Unicomp that was in pristine condition. Just goes to show the actual switch feel hasn't changed that much. And Thomas's pristine one was 20 years older. Also Thomas, post your Data Dasher review ...

The stuff that makes conductive domes conductive is usually carbon doping in the rubber. Which is the same thing you use to make capacitive plastic like Model-F flippers. So as long as you can control the sensitivity of the topre pads (you might need a new controller) plain old conductive domes shou...

I looked at the thread earlier and the link was working. Maybe he changed something...

Not all of his listings have a ridiculous shipping cost, but the board that I got from him had a shipping cost of $35. That's close to the minimum cost for me to ship a beamspring (over 10 lb) but the entire package I got was around 5 lb. Yikes, now THAT'S a gouge. I was looking at the ones I was i...

Ebay gives you commercial rates on postage so it pretty much evens out what they take in fees and what you save from going to the post office. Though that means in reality you aren't actually saving anything, which sucks and boy do they try to hide it under "You saved X". But then I don't charge on ...

Saw an NMB OEM AT with second gen brown tactile space invaders I think based on the FCC:ID. Has some neat colored legends but I'm clicky or linear. I don't care for tactiles much. Seller also has a couple F XT's pretty cheap. https://www.ebay.com/itm/MEMOREX-PERSONAL-SYSTEM-KEYBOARD-8657-5370-AS-IS/...

It's like looking at a scientific data terminal instead of a banking machine. I love it.

Cool board IKSLM. I love seeing a couple others pop out of the woodwork. QWERTZ can't be that common either. Also like what you did with the blue rocker switch - mine's just decoration at this point. It honestly is mostly decoration anyway :D I really wanted to give it its own row but the bus was li...

Saw this Epson that looked pretty cool. Price was a little too high for my taste and I got too many projects already though. Should be Fujitsu 1st gen leaf springs I think.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Epson- ... 3157984734

Yeah, that will take some coding, which is not my strong suit. xwhatsit is open source though IIRC so it should be possible. DMA could probably help directly with his own stuff, but that would require a new controller.

Honestly, looking at layouts, going that route, it's probably smarter to just stick the Futaba caps on the Pingmaster. JP!'s looks real nice that way.

To do that on an xwhatsit, you need to use the unused pins in the expansion header, which means you're going to need to muck up that pretty connector to the solenoid board. The two LED's are pins 3 and 5 as you can see here. Those pins are + https://i.imgur.com/VfbJMqR.png You'll also need current l...

Cool. I think I saw this one for sale awhile back. Thought it had tall keytronic because of the shape of the modifiers and the return. I've never tried the old waffle grid. How do they compare to the later linear space invaders?

Even though I'm mostly an originalist, I was still thinking how one of these would look nice in a black case like your 3278. In other news, I just figured out one thing I screwed up. The USB micro cable I used was a phone charging smart cable and it was choking the current to the solenoid. :roll: Sw...

Model F's are pretty simple and tough beasts. Glad you got everything running. It's a good find.

The only thing I don't like about them is they activate too high up for my taste. It means someone with hammer fingers like me constantly makes typos on them. I did fully replace dirty MD's on a board with NOS awhile back though, and the difference was pretty impressive. I'd compare it to dirty vs. ...

Hammer hinges weren't in their slots or keycaps caught on the springs when you put them on. Just reseat everything and make sure it's right and put it back together. It should work fine.

Thanks guys. And yeah, you hit the nail on the head how I use this kind of layout. Left side is layer selection plus Esc/Solenoid/PrintScreen/etc while nav block is used as a media key block in the layer where the numpad is a tkl. All works pretty great in daily use and still have a number pad and F...

You can get NOS Futaba MD's that should be a drop in replacement for cheap. They're still short throw and kinda heavy but new and very smooth. Should be about $15+shipping for enough for a whole board. And it's a straight upgrade. The old complicated linears are better than the MRs. https://www.elec...

Damn, those caps are like looking at old Honeywells or Futabas.

Orihalcon has a bunch of F parts in his sale thread in the Marketplace forum. If you mean you need keycaps, then yeah, M stuff is compatible with F barrels.

You'll have to vertically cut the mounts of the keycaps anyway. Best to not muck with the beamspring stuff and modify the expendable caps instead. Personally, I'd cut the cap mounts with a dremel wheel until they fit, then fill in the excess space with resin or epoxy putty to make custom mounts that...

Only ever seen a handful of these converted, so thought I would share this one and give the old Model C some love. So this is probably the most oft-maligned member of the Model F family. Little more of a pain to convert, case doesn't like to be shipped like the F122 but worse, needs a new armature f...

The numpad numbers seem to have been pretty uncommon compared to the PF stuff. I know where you're coming from though, as I just made the same upgrade on my 3178 C2 with C4 caps.

You're right about the Fortran thing in Earth Sciences. I had a guy teaching me Fortran in Advanced Hydro years ago for aquifer modelling who brought out his original code in a stack of punchcards from when he was a grad student. It was pretty clean and straightforward though, just an iterative matr...

These are plain old contact switches so like Murium said, easiest thing is probably to desolder the PCB and hand wire a matrix. Bonus, you get the switches loose and can clean them before putting everything back together. Should be about $10 for the wire, $15 for the Teensy 2.0 ++ controller, $2 for...

Just use this to make the keys keyboard-layout-editor.com. Loads of colors and symbols for whatever you please. Then make sure the 1U internal side stuff is 11mmx11mm when you print it out (any graphic program should show you this, or you can just measure the first print and adjust the print size by...

Finished a couple projects lately and got a couple new ones so it's time to trim the collection a bit again. I decided to keep my Univac Keytronic for this particular kind of switch type and sell the Genrad, solely because I'm a big layout guy. This is fully converted to NKRO USB and restored with D...