A few weeks ago I've turned my almost 20 year old, but very solid WYSE keyboard (with Cherry MX Black keys) into a wireless one, and after that I also made it tenkeyless...
Below follows the recipe:
I still had an unused
Logitech Cordless keyboard for Wii lying here somewhere, so I demolished this controller PCB out of it:
Then I mapped the keycodes from the regarding controller, these codes appeared to form a matrix of 8 x 18, which I named 1 to 8 and A to R.
By running
showkey (a program which shows which key has been pressed), and then shorting every combination of row and column (one pair at a time), and writing down the result, I got this table with all possible keycodes:
Then I took an old-fashioned solid keyboard with real keys, not only because of these are solderable, but also because typing on these is way better than those new-fashioned rubbish of nowadays...
Then I demolished the PCB completely off of the metal plate, on which all keys are mounted (in those square holes as you'll see on the photo below), and by demolishing the PCB off of it, there was more room for the wiring. The PCB was actually used to stabilize the space bar, but with a few pieces of beer mat this was resolved just as easily.
After that I soldered a complete new matrix of wires, according to the table I've made earlier.
Then I screwed up the back (I did not implement a battery cover, because the batteries (AAA) will last long enough, and therefore I don't have to remove the back cover very often).
My keyboard was finished now, but I wasn't fully satisfied. Though I wired the whole keyboard completely, I still didn't really wanted to have a numerical pad; actually I'm never using it, so why not just saw it off?
As I haven't done this before, for security I took another exemplar of a similar keyboard, which I sawed it into three pieces (middle part not shown):
Out of the middle part of the back cover, I made a few slides, which served as a kind of tape, to glue the two outer parts to each other. The housing consists of ABS, but I've glued it successfully with hard PVC-glue:
Whereas cutting and gluing the upper part of this exemplar went very well, I also did the rest, and this is the final result,
a nice old-fashioned decent tenkeyless winkeyless wireless real keyboard:
(You might have seen this photo before, because yesterday I posted my mod on
a dutch forum, and this photo has been posted
here by
JaccoW...)