Yesterday I took the time to start taking apart some of my rapidly-growing Matias Mini keyboard collection and discovered some interesting things that I have not seen in previous posts, so I imagine that some of them are relatively new changes to the design. First off, I had read horror stories of the micro USB connectors being damaged. It looks as though, at some point, Matias reinforced this with a huge block of plastic which seems to be screwed directly to the PCB:
I'm sorry about the graininess, the lighting wasn't great. Take note of the resistor solder pads labeled R26, R17, and R15. It turns out they're very useful, as you'll see shortly.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to be breaking, as much as I hate micro USB.
Now, here's where it really gets interesting, and I haven't seen this anywhere else yet, although my searches on Matias controllers may not be exhaustive. Matias, or their suppliers, have been kind enough to mark exactly where to remove or add resistors on the previously-shown pads in order to set the board to a given layout. The possible layouts seem to include US_MAC, EU_MAC, JP_MAC, PC, and PC_JP. One of the nicest things about this is that the US_MAC layout, which is basically the only configuration in which to actually get clicky switches straight from the factory within the U.S., is that enabling it requires all of these pads to be unpopulated, meaning you could buy a US_MAC layout board and easily convert it to whichever layout you like (at least when it comes to mapping) by soldering a 100 ohm resistor (going off of the code 101-marked resistors on my PC "Quiet Pro" boards) between the designated pads. I had a recently-acquired used Mac layout "Tactile Pro" board and figured it was a good guinea pig with which to test this.
I had some through-hole resistors of various ratings lying around for such occasions, so I bent and snipped the legs to fit and soldered them down. To my surprise I actually managed to lift the pad on the bottom left (R15), so that's why I figured why not reinforce what remained of the dangling trace with some extra solder.
Abracadabra, my horrendous Mac layout is no more, and the controller acts just like the standard PC layout now.
But wait, there's more.I had been wanting to change the color of the boring old green caps lock LED to something more unique/interesting/personal. Since Matias touted the transparent switch housing design to be able to allow SMD LEDs, I was fearing for the worst in that I may have to desolder the switch above it and/or even maybe desolder every single switch and remove the plate just to get at it. Matias did something curious instead, something I imagine some of you may appreciate as much as myself.
That's an SMD LED soldered to two pads on either side of a hole in the PCB. Interesting choice if you ask me. My guess is it was literally meant to be easily removable without tearing the whole assembly apart.
I desoldered the SMD LED, dug out an old LED sampler pack I had lying around, stuffed a 3mm through-hole LED into the hole in the PCB, bent the legs to generally match up with the solder pads, soldered and snipped. It isn't the prettiest thing I have ever done, but who cares? Nobody is ever going to see it in there, and it was fast and simple enough to do pretty quick on two boards I just so happened to feel like taking apart. I imagine I'll be doing it on more in the future.
funkmon had already requested a picture of the menacing black board with a red caps lock LED, so here's a few pictures of that. Yeah, my desk is a mess, and the lighting isn't great there. Oh well, it is representative enough.
Yeah, that's a Matias switch sampler pack on the left. This board's currently got clicky leaves swapped in in place of the tactile ones, with the dampened slider. I love the sound, but I'm still on the fence about the feel. I think I may linearize at least one of my boards as well to play with.
On an unrelated but maybe helpful note, this seems like a great place to add some rubber feet if you have one of these things and don't like how unstable they seem to be on desks. I'm not sure why Matias decided to leave out any rubber feet in this area of the board.
That's all for now. I hope somebody finds this helpful. I know I was overjoyed to discover the resistor thing, and I imagine somebody could easily rig up some switches and/or jumpers to make switching between layouts easier if they plan on using both Windows and OSX/MacOS pretty routinely, etc. It looks like the same board PCBs may also be used in their bluetooth variants, as there also seemed to be an unpopulated block of pins that made mention of a bluetooth module, and battery indicator lights, etc.