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Problem with GMMK?

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N8N:
Good morning all,

A few months ago I purchased a GMMK barebones, a set of Boba U4s, and some /dev/tty keycaps.  I took the board to work and it's been in daily use ever since.

This morning I was chatting with a gentleman from our programming group in India, first time I'd interacted with this individual so super embarassing, and my keyboard is just going nuts, it's giving me carriage returns instead of spaces and at other random times as well.  Rebooting my laptop didn't help, nor did unplugging and replugging the board.  I ended up starting the GMMK software and restoring to factory defaults and it gave me a few more random carriage returns and then started working correctly.

Has anyone else had this happen?  Can I trust this board as my primary work board?  I loved everything about it up until a few minutes ago, and my coworkers will probably kill me if I go back to the default gimme board (I end up writing a lot of emails and documents and actually can type properly, and I do see their point, me typing on a dome board sounds like a Jeep driving down a gravel road.)

Now I have to spend another 10 minutes fixing my backlighting because I lost my nice pretty scheme when I reset the board.

didjamatic:
I've seen this kind of thing on older, dirty keyboards.  Loose connections, cold solder joints can be suspect.

Unrelated Protip: Don't sharpen pencils over mechanical keyboards, graphite is conductive and can do bad things inside electronics.  You can actually use a pencil to draw a line between 2 traces or contacts and it will conduct.

N8N:
It's only maybe 3 months old, and I a) rarely use pencils and b) when I do, I have an electric sharpener so shavings never fall anywhere.

The funny thing is, I've used several vintage boards for work boards previously (old Cherries, SGI Granite, Wyse terminal etc.) with no issue, and my most recent work board was a self modified Filco that I've used for over 10 years (put used Cherry Clears in it as at that time you could not get them any other way than harvesting from a POS board) and that one is still kicking, just not as quiet.

I guess I will bring the Filco back in to work to keep on deck if this messes up again and just keep my fingers crossed...

didjamatic:
At 3 months you're pretty much burned in with most electronics... but keyboards aren't most electronics.  They continually flex and are physically moved and pressed on millions of times, so a cold solder joint, faulty trace or ribbon cable can manifest really at any time.  Also a staple or fragment of metal or solder from manufacturing can be loose in side and cause issues like you're seeing.

N8N:
I just realized that this happened only a few minutes after I had an IT person remote into my machine to help troubleshoot a printing problem... you don't think that that could have scrambled something in the GMMK do you?  I wouldn't think so, but that was the only thing that I did today that I didn't do any other day.

I'm still using the board now, am typing quite rapidly to create this post, and it seems to be working fine...

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