I have this board I needed to clean up for a while now. It’s an Atari TT 030 keyboard with an AZERTY layout.
Beside being dirty, the keyboard seems to sink in the frame and there is some sort of rattling song when you shake it.
For those who are interested, the TT 030 was a Motorola 68030 based workstation class computer Atari released in the early 90s mainly for the European industrial market,
Germany being his prime target. It came out with TOS 3 operating system but could also uses multiple variations of UNIX. Also it is fully compatible with the Atari MegaST keyboard.
The lighting doesn’t make justice to the level of grime and yellowing this keyboard is in.
It’s not terrible because I made a very quick surface cleaning when I got it, but it’s certainly dirty and yellow.
The key caps are made of ABS and the lettering is printed.
The lettering seems to be sort of marine blue but looking at the less yellowed caps, it seems it was more on the greenish side (once cleaned).
But what lies under the caps? Doom! Well no, actually it’s more like Mitsumi hybrid switches…
… and there are of multiple kinds too D:
I kinda start to feel like it will be a better time investment to roast demons on the summit of Mt. Erebus rather than cleaning this mess.
Anyway, let’s flip it and admire his feet before cracking the case open.
Just three screws and we are in, one of them in under the warranty sticker.
So inside there is a board module in which the switches reside. This module is wired to a PCB with two ribbon cables and a ground wire on one of the connector for the mouse and joystick.
There is also these little buggers running free inside the case.
That explains the noise I heard while shaking the board, I hope it’s more the result of someone sitting on it rather than a mechanical default resulting of a bad design, and that some epoxy will be able to fix that for good.
Two of those stands are broken on the back panel and on on the top one.
And here is the kind of cable and connector this board uses.
The PCB
sports electrolytic capacitors with unmarked polarity D:
Those have to go, I’ll need to order some solid replacement parts.
Right now I have Nichicon parts I could use to replace one of them but I don’t want to put components that will eventually leak inside, and using Nichicon caps in a Mitsumi hybrid keyboard sounds like wasting food to me.
Meanwhile, let’s take apart the key module
and remove the sliders to clean everything thoroughly.
And apparently the plastic was made in May 1990
(don’t mind the ALPS black leave springs)
Beside the cable I can’t do much without the new capacitors.
So, more latter.