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I've broken my nice Steampunk keyboard. :( Yesterday I finally got sick of the brown tape I'd wrapped around the cable and decided to replace it by threading it through a bootlace with the middle bit removed. This is a trick I've seen on several builds, and I rather like it. Unfortunately cutting it is easy. Reconnecting is not. I cut far too close to the board, and through various errors ended up removing part of the PCB with the soldering iron. Now I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that's fatal.
Ho-hum I think, off to Maplin for a new £5 keyboard, swap the cables around, and this time I'll use glue and string, and not be so ambitious. Turns out they don't sell the keyboard any more. Cheapest one they have is £10, never mind, I'll get it and it'll be fine. It is of course too much to expect that I'll be able to reuse the original frame, but I have found a replacement. Unfortunately its actually worse to type on. The keys are really nasty and squishy, and even more inconveniently the squishy membrane bit is made of individual bits. I've already lost one opening up the back to take a look! And the long keys have these metal bits which probably help pring them back up, but after being cut down actually stop the key springing back!
Has someone seen the Steampunk genre and decided to make their products as awkward to mod as possible? Still the board itself is black, which at least cuts down on painting all the key-stems, and the plastic is a little flimsier, which means I can pull things apart with pliers, rather than dremelling everything.
Frankly the most annoying part of the whole thing is having to get a replacement lining for the key-trays. I'm out of the leatherette I got for next to nowt, and can't reuse it as the holes I've cut are the wrong shape and in the wrong place.
Ho-hum I think, off to Maplin for a new £5 keyboard, swap the cables around, and this time I'll use glue and string, and not be so ambitious. Turns out they don't sell the keyboard any more. Cheapest one they have is £10, never mind, I'll get it and it'll be fine. It is of course too much to expect that I'll be able to reuse the original frame, but I have found a replacement. Unfortunately its actually worse to type on. The keys are really nasty and squishy, and even more inconveniently the squishy membrane bit is made of individual bits. I've already lost one opening up the back to take a look! And the long keys have these metal bits which probably help pring them back up, but after being cut down actually stop the key springing back!
Has someone seen the Steampunk genre and decided to make their products as awkward to mod as possible? Still the board itself is black, which at least cuts down on painting all the key-stems, and the plastic is a little flimsier, which means I can pull things apart with pliers, rather than dremelling everything.
Frankly the most annoying part of the whole thing is having to get a replacement lining for the key-trays. I'm out of the leatherette I got for next to nowt, and can't reuse it as the holes I've cut are the wrong shape and in the wrong place.
