M0110 retro 60%

[jsheradin]

I grabbed a good condition Apple M0110 recently and plan to give it a bit of a modernization. I gave it a quick test with a TMK protocol adapter and man, these are some smooth switches! They all seem to work and feel fine, should I go through the effort of pulling them apart, cleaning, and lubing? I'm probably going to brighten the case and keys with some peroxide but I don't want to go full white with it. I decided to ditch the PCB and go with a handwired full diode matrix as it seems the shift and option keys are not individually addressable with just a protocol adapter.


Yes I stole the phone jack off a wall in my house.

[jsheradin]

I took one of the switches apart and tried a couple different lubes I had on hand. Pure silicone seemed to be smoothest overall but it wasn't noticeably better than the unopened switches; I decided to just leave them as is.

The matrix could have been neater but I wanted to keep it close to square since the controller I'm planning to use doesn't have a ton of pins.






Time to get going with the de-yellowing while I'm waiting on a package from Adafruit.

[jsheradin]

Armed with some 8% peroxide, large plastic bags, and a sous vide cooker I went about the un-yellowing.


I tried to not go too overboard on it, just get rid of the bit of orange tint it was picking up.



I ended up going with an Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE running QMK for the controller. Super nice little dev board with onboard Bluetooth and battery charger. Biggest complaint about it is that it only has 17 usable pins. It's only really good for a 60% unless you go with I/O expanders and whatnot.



Initial plan was to mount the Feather right to the casing (hence the 3d printed adapter being perfect for it) but I made a last minute decision to use a mini-USB to micro-USB adapter so that it matches all my other KBs.



Filled the case with some acoustic stuffing to try to dampen some of the ringing of the SKCCs. Didn't help a ton but the keyboard's sound has a nice deep solid thud to it now. I also isolated the switch plate from the case with some 1.5mm foam tape on either side of the mount points. This also takes up the slack from the PCB being missing.


I went a bit heavy on the space bar and ended up bleaching it a bit unfortunately. I might give some dyes a try and see if I can match it a bit better. Other than that I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out!



I'll probably replace the original feet since they are a bit gummy.


Used some satin 'fossil' colored paint for the power switch and IO shield. The color isn't perfect but it's pretty close.


Feature summary:

• Full NKRO matrix

• QMK remappable layered crazyness

• USB/Bluetooth auto and manual output switching via a key-combo

• USB charging and KB output over the same port

• 4400 mAh battery

This whole post was typed over Bluetooth using the keyboard!

[SneakyRobb]

Hi,

This is really cool. Good job! I don't know enough about the switches to say about cleaning. I will say with skcm alps you know when they need cleaning. If they are good and you like using them, it may be correct to just keep using them

[zrrion]

SKCC is pretty resilient as far as dust goes, so if they are presently clean I wouldn't worry about lubing them.

[m_raggie]

Inspiring work! Well done.

[matt3o]

how's the battery life? what QMK keyboard did you use as base?

I did a m0110 a while back (too lazy to search but it's here on DT) and I have another ready to be modded I also happen to have that very same adafruit controller.

[anthonymak]

nice work, I use a new pcb for my m0110, the pcb uses a pro micro as controller but I am going to remap the pcb with a 32u4 feather. and is now waiting for wire and plugs to do the remap.

[matt3o]

nice work, I use a new pcb for my m0110, the pcb uses a pro micro as controller but I am going to remap the pcb with a 32u4 feather. and is now waiting for wire and plugs to do the remap.

what PCB?

[anthonymak]

I've got the pcb file from a guy "cerement".

nice work, I use a new pcb for my m0110, the pcb uses a pro micro as controller but I am going to remap the pcb with a 32u4 feather. and is now waiting for wire and plugs to do the remap.

[jsheradin]

how's the battery life? what QMK keyboard did you use as base?

I haven't done too much testing on battery life yet; I'll see how long it lasts starting now I guess. My computer boots to a GRUB menu which doesn't have BT support so I mostly use it in USB mode. I plant to make one of the CSR8510 HID dongles which should solve my use case issue.

Firmware is super basic, I just used the output from kbfirmware for a 32u4 and changed a couple things in rules.mk to match the Feather. The board comes with one of the pins on a voltage divider to measure battery level. I still need to figure out how to report that over BT. There's probably a bunch that can be done to save on battery life with BT sleep modes and whatnot too.

Changes to rules.mk:

Code: Select all

F_CPU = 8000000
NKRO_ENABLE ?= no
BOOTLOADER = caterina
BLUETOOTH_ENABLE ?= no
BLUETOOTH = AdafruitBLE

[jsheradin]

how's the battery life?

Sorry for the late reply; this thing lasted a bit longer than I expected. I managed to get two samples of battery life using a hard-bound bluetooth dongle and the fully charged 4400mAh battery. Both lasted right around 4.5 weeks of continuous connection.

[matt3o]

how's the battery life?

Sorry for the late reply; this thing lasted a bit longer than I expected. I managed to get two samples of battery life using a hard-bound bluetooth dongle and the fully charged 4400mAh battery. Both lasted right around 4.5 weeks of continuous connection.

that's really not bad at all