Thanks for the efforts, gents! I'll have a little play around this evening/weekend to study these and get some vectored-up. I'm a little worried about using copyright material, is there anyone out there with experience with this type of thing vis a vis keycap GBs?
Some updates on my GID keyboard investigations.
- First, just arrived is the GID 60% case from Aliexpress. It's still in the plastic wrap but I can see definitely more translucent than the SP GID keys which are effectively opaque. I'll check it in more detail once I get back to my workshop/kitchen.
- In the meantime, speaking of experiments, my pet pee detector (UV flashlight) has arrived. I've been shining it on a bunch of things around my house, and I can confirm the GID caps I have (four Poison caps) respond
really well to the UV, both reflecting brightly, and charging with just one pass of the light over the top:
GID caps under UV at approx. 1.5m distance
A few second later, with watch and LED charging cable lume for comparison
Close up caps under covers to block all light
Close up caps under covers to block all light
- And just for fun, shining the UV torch onto a bunch of things around my apt with no rigour in offset distance or material type, just seeing what glows:
More
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And now some findings and public service announcement: The UV light charges the GID caps
extraordinarily quickly, much quicker than any other light source I've tried, other than the sun, and the glow is
very bright indeed. HOWEVER the phosphorescence is not persistent and follows a power law of 1/t (check the links for the equation form, I'm not even going to attempt to do this in the forum editor!). GID toys, and likely these caps, that use Zinc Sulphide (ZnS) as the doping agent, glow extremely bright for a few seconds (I'm talking LED bright) which quickly decays, then glow for a longer time at a lower intensity. From recent adult, and previous early childhood, experience, the glow is best experienced in pitch black with your pupils having time to dilate nice and big.
The take-home on this is the GID caps will be visible in the dark however they won't glow most brilliantly while you use your screen as the light from the screen will both drown the GID and cause your pupils to constrict making them less sensitive to the GID phosphorescence. I say all this as I don't want anyone to be under the illusion that your keyboard will look like a glowstick unless you charge it every so often with a UV light (again, the UV light charges the caps in a literal second) - this is GID material not a chemical-, electro-, or thermo-luminescent reaction.
In BONUS SCIENCE, I have run a quick trial with UV LEDs as per-key lights. I don't have any pics of this yet, but the effect is similar to regular per-key LED lighting, except there is no light bleed from around the caps as only the caps glow (I'm using a black PCB and matte black switch plate - results will vary with different PCB/switchplate colours). As the light is from below, there is a telegraphing of the thicker parts of the caps, ie. the corners around the top surface are darker than the walls. The UV LEDs I have also charge the caps harder than regular white LEDs, this is visible once you turn the backlight off.
I've also spoken with SP about options for different GID additives though this hasn't gone very far yet, though so far they don't have a range of additive options, only the one which comes from their supplier.
- NEXT STEPS: I'll try get some comparison shots of the UV and regular LED per-key lighting, and a video showing the charge/decay of the SP SA Poison caps. I'll also hopefully get some more feedback on the additives. Strontium Aluminate is a higher performing GID compound though this comes at a premium and may not be an available option, though worth asking.
- Links to the science:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescencehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_sulfidehttp://laser.physics.sunysb.edu/~jill/reureport.htmlhttps://depts.washington.edu/uwcei/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Phosphorescent_Decay.pdfAll off my Lumia 950, images untouched