What and Why?I'm aiming to produce a 50% (52 key) keyboard using parts from an Apple Standard Keyboard with the medium ass enter (M0116). Why this keyboard? I managed to pick one up for a steal and I really wanted to learn KiCad, great excuse right? The layout is going to be weird but the aim is to have a board that is almost 40% width while maintain the original layout of the M0116.
Why not just make a 60% board? Well thats too easy, initially I was going to create a 40% but I had to sacrifice too much (profile and stagger) to get there, I am interested if anyone else has any ideas on how to do it. If anyone wants to take on the challenge heres my KLE for the
M0116, any help is welcome!
Seven PsThis is my filthy M0116, the poor thing was yellowed and covered in god knows what. The case had a lot of marks on it, I have absolutely no idea where this keyboard has spent the last 20-30 years but it was full of wasps...but the key caps were pristine and the switches were in useable order but I knew a lot of work needed to be put into them to get them back to their former glory. As you can see I got some dirty Orange alps, I will be committing a horrific act against alps and I'll be click modding them, I love the tactility but I also love audible feedback the answer is clear. The hope is to use the latching alps as well for my function layer but we'll see how the pans out, might be a pain to use? The previous owner(s?) seem to have attacked the apple logo with a sharp object, all they had to do was take the case apart and pop it off from the back, alas this is the situation I find myself in. I was hoping to use this in the case design but now the hope is to either get my hands on a replacement or have something akin to an enamel pin made up.
Getting the case off of the M0116 is super easy, two screws and the bezel pops right off. Pulling the key caps off was a little nerve racking as I've seen the horror stories of Alps stems stuck in Alps sliders </3. I cleaned the back of the PCB with distilled water and a tooth brush, I left the plate looking like it does because I wanted as little to do with it as possible. De-soldering was done with with solder wick, no idea how people use the solder suckers I've never had any luck with them. All in this took about 3 hours, lots of long breaks were had, tedious work
Taking apart Alps switches is beautifully simple, cleaning them not so much. Sliders and housings go straight into a bath of warm water and dish soap to soak for a while and the switchplate and leaf spring get sorted into bags to be dealt with later. Once the housings and sliders had been soaked I scrubbed them with a toothbrush, the sliders were the grimiest and went from feeling rough to smooth in a single wash, quite an improvement! When it came to drying them I didn't really want to individually dry each so I went to leave them in the sun, sadly the British autumn isn't exactly helpful when it comes to providing sun...the little streak of sun that I did get had a habit of running away so I spent an afternoon sun chasing.
Next came the click mod. I'm not 100% on how the community feels about this mod but if this isn't for you now is the time to look away. I bent all of the leaves off of the leaf springs, Chyrosran recommended to take all of them off and from testing I have to agree. I ended up using forceps because thats what I had at hand, actually worked really well
It was slow work but it was worth it, I even ended up with a bunch of silver fish scales! When taking apart the switches I ended up with 2 white switchplates, I found it interesting that the only switchplates with any real corrosion on were the white switchplates
obviously this is a coincidence but an interesting observation!
Like I said, I initially was looking at the possibility of a 40% board but it required having almost all of the modifier keys be on the wrong row, turns out the apple profile is a lot less forgiving than I thought it would be. You might also notice that the top row is shifted too far to the left and that makes WASD very awkward, if I wasn't a gamer I might have been willing to look past that but I just couldn't make it work. Since I was short on time when I did this I only had an oppurtunity to wash the keys but over the next few days I got round to cleaning the switches and it was quite an endeavour. I also took this opportunity to trim the moulding marks off of the key caps, some of them were huge!
Reassembling the switches was an endeavour, there are quite a few parts and there are quite a few switches to put back together. I started with nice neat rows, slider goes into the top housing and the click leaf follows soon after. All the click leaves had been bent back to give them their tactility back, quite a few had been squished almost flat, god knows what had happened to them in their previous lives. As you can see I got gradually less organized until when it came to putting the bottom part of the housing on I just had a pile of switches scattered across the table. I did one last check of the switches and sorted out some stragglers that refused to click properly and then bagged them all up for safety along with the key caps.
My precious!
PCB design hellSo this is my proposed design, this is what I am building my PCB/Case/Plate around, its a 52 key compact layout. Not a whole lot of punctuation but since I'm used to them being on layers that won't be an issue. Caps lock will be the function layer key, still deciding whether it will be the latching Alps or not.
Used kbfirmware to help plan the pin out before I started the PCB, helped get my head around the matrix in KiCad. The guide on the
deskthority wiki as well as
Ruiqimaos excellent guide god knows if what I have produced so far is any good but very early stages! As ever any help is appreciated, curently trying to decide between using device like a teensy/promicro or trying to solder an atmega32u4 onto a PCB