New Model F FSSK R2 review. Plus suggestions/tutorial to fix some of the weaker points. Also reviewing the overall new Model F project.
- Keycaps/switchesMechanically, the keyboard quality is 10/10. The switch/keycap quality is indistinguishable from the original IBM ones, and it’s compatible with them.
1-2 spring popped out during the shipping and got lost, so I thought. But later I found them buried within the packing material. I still bought extra switch components, for any future repairibiliy I may run into.
For popping the springs back, you likely wont need to open the whole keyboard just:
1) pop off the keycaps
2) Have an overhead lights and shine into the barrel, so you can actually see where you would need to put the spring back
3) Have flat headed tweezers and grab the spring in about 2/3 or 3/4 of the length
4) Make sure the top end part of the spring coil is looking roughly 12 a clock. You don’t need to be super precise, but the closer you are the better chance for proper buckling.
4) Try to aim for the pin on the flipper within the barrel, and slowly lower the spring to it.
5) Without letting the tweezers go, carefully compress the spring fully a few times with the remaining 1/3 or ¼ part. As if you would simulate a bounce a few times.
6) Done, the spring is now fully installed.
- Scratchy keycapsIf you run into this, it’s very normal imho, and the reason you likely never felt this with the old IMB keyboards, that they are worn down already.
The new keycaps may have imperfections from the manufacturing process. To overcome the scratchiness faster then wearing them down, is to feel with your nail the bottom edges around your keycaps that goes into the barrels. If you notice any burr, use a sharp knife and carefully shave them off. This should solve all related issues.
Once installing your keycaps back, make sure to press them around all edges and if you still experience scratching somewhere, take them off and its time for some more burr-shaving.
- ElectonicsI will deep dive into here, because I had the most issues here.
The worst part of the keyboard is the electronics design imho. The xwhatsit controller PCB is solid enough, but the capacitive PCB is the root of many issues and glitches this keyboard has, I believe. If there are no issues with the electronic communication from the capaticive PCB to the controller, it is very unlikely that one would experience glitches. Also, Joe wouldn’t have a dedicated, long manual area about mitigating these issues, if this would be experienced by only handful of people. If the electronics was done right, none of the people should experience communication issues. The switch mechanic is dead simple. As long it buckles and the flippers do their job, this should be the case imho.
Electronics repairability is difficult to impossible, if you don't have required tools, knowledge, and dexterity. I’m not an expert on soldering by any means, but not a newb either, and had multiple issues I needed to overcome.
It's a two layer of PCB, so there are traces over the top and bottom of it.
Soldering the top layer of the PCB is not too bad.
But using the "adding a bit extra solder" method, as stated in the manual is probably not going to work for the bottom layer. The solder would need to dribble down the hole and spread around, to form a solid connection across both trace ends. Which is likely not going to happen.
Using the diagnostic tool to identify physical communication issues with the electronics paths is like scratching your stomach while having a back itch.
The best is to break down the electronics areas to individual logical parts. I'm a software developer, so I'm a believer of tight separation of concerns, when troubleshooting, if you need to make sure you're successful.
1) The capacitive PCBI had several continuity / soldering issues over multiple points. Many letters and columns haven’t worked at all, left tab, shift, ctrl, etc. Also the connection wires are very short and stiff, making it difficult to troubleshoot the whole thing. My F50 had connection issues too (although not as extensively), which I had also fixed since.
This all could have been avoided, if we would simply have those "Card Edge/Pad Card" beefy rectangular edge traces on the capacitive PCB, like implemented to IBM beamspring keyboards, and use them to directly slide on the controller PCB:
But fear not, I have suggestions how we can improve the current design, without involving way too much work.
Fortunately the hole distance is exactly 2.54mm, so we can solder right angled header pins, to the controller and capacitive PCB. Then we can connect each other with cables. This has many flexibility and advantages. One of the greatest one is, that we can now very easily separate the components from each other, and troubleshoot or upgrade them individually:
Try to not push the pins into the PCB all the way, but only until they reach the full thickness of the PCB. So now you'll still have enough space and material from the pins to work with.
These pins will not interfere with assembling and disassembling the keyboard components, I made sure to measure. They will not make contact with the steel parts either, so this mod wont cause shorts. The only thing you need to do after, is to bend the pins upward slightly, so the steel hooks from the keyboard plate will not interfere with the wire connections, under them:
There is just enough space to implement all this on controller too, and fit the connectors cables, so presumably this should be an Ultra Compact Model F compatible improvement too:
There is just enough space to implement all this on controller too, and fit the connectors cables, so presumably this should be an Ultra Compact Model F compatible improvement too:
You can tidy and move the extra cables around as you see fit:
But personally I ended up mounting the controller PCB in 180degrees, since I have plenty of top space at the FSSK, and I can just shove all the extra cables into the empty areas:
(yes, mounting the detachable USB connection to the case, is a project for another day. For now it will just dingle outside)
After we got the pins soldered to PCB, the next task is to make 100% sure the capacitive PCB traces properly conduct electricity everywhere. Make sure you even attempt to move pins around a bit, to make sure continuity/soldering is rock solid. There are no designated testing points on the PCB unfortunately, but we can make some ourselves by carefully scratching off the soldering mask with a sharp knife:
We can now use one end of a multi-meter on each of these testing points, and the other end of the multi-meter on each pins to check continuity.
Ideally, you will never ever need to take the keyboard's inner assembly apart or the keycaps off, in case you need to do further electronics repairs, because you made sure that all electric paths from the pins to capacitive PCB is rock solid.
The row holes are easier to solder, and are located on the bottom part of PCB. The column holes are on the top, and are somewhat reachable without disassembling the whole keyboard. Although, I highly recommend not soldering and testing it assembled, you'll only get flustered.
Some of the column pin holes are very finicky, and actually split to two different trace directions, so you need to make sure you check continuity on both, like the #24th for instance:
#29 doesn’t seems to be connected to anything while I inspected the capacitive PCB, but according to the manual it supposed to be ground. So I connected it to ground. Perhaps it’s not going to help, but for sure not going to hurt either.
I discovered this multi-directional trace continuity issue when I had all the right angle pins installed already. No way I’m going to take all this off, so I just slightly bent the pins upwards a bit more to fit under them with the soldering iron. The trace was mangled up it seems at one area, or cracked? I never could produce a solidly consistent connection with soldering. So, I rather scratched up a healthy part of the trace and padded the cracked / mangled up parts with a copper wire. That finally seems to have fixed all the remaining spotty connection issues:
Many of the Model F manual instructions were useful, but some aren't. Like the PCB descriptions and images should be keyboard specific imho and much more detailed. Also I have trouble making out the individual traces on those low resolution pink/blue images from the manual. I had to map them out myself instead.
On other hand, this was very useful for instance:
Tools that you will likely need are:
- Soldering Iron
- Solder
- Soldering flux
- Desoldering station (or wick, depending how much you prefer to suffer, or pay up)
- Multi-meter
2) Interconnecting wires.Wires can be individually tested also, to make sure there is proper continuity everywhere.
Header wires can be easily disconnected and connected whenever you need to troubleshoot or upgrade something. Fear not, they actually form a super tight connection if you use these "10in a row" types of connectors, you wont have communication issues. You need to put in a good, well intended effort to take them off the pins.
Longer wires will also help in case you need to turn on the capacitive PCB with the controller to test any stuff, without assembling the whole keyboard and install keys. You can hover/lower a single flipper above a given key position, and it should produce a letter on the screen. You can also use your finger if you want, it's a capacitive PCB in the matter of fact. But you may get a bit less consistent response in this case.
3) The controller PCB.For the controller PCB, you can test the continuity on each pin similarly as for the capacitive PCB. But you don’t need to scratch off the solder mask, but just use the connected legs of the chips or other electronic components as contact points.
In case something deeper is wrong here and you feel adventurous, you can attempt to fiddle with individual electronics components within the PCB. A tools that you want to add here to your arsenal, is a microscope, for soldering the microscopic components.
It’s also relatively easy to simply buy a whole new controller PCB instead.
- SoftwareSoftware is finally VIAL compatible, so it uses the best community project for the purpose.
Big kudos to all the community members also, who were tirelessly working on improving the software and controller hardware design over the time.
I've occasionally experienced sleep/wake exceptions with the XWhatsit controller on Windows, needing to open Driver Manager and turn off then on the related (usb?) driver to make the keyboard work again. No software/driver issues experienced at all on Linux.
I'm probably going to get and install the new Leyden Jar for myself as an upgrade, to increase the overall possible stability, hoping get it up to the "it will likely never fail" level. It's just an even more mature/modern polished design it seems, compared to xwhatsit.
But all in all, software is in great shape so far, and it will only get better from here on. I’m loving to see how the mechanical keyboard community inspired and helped each other, starting from the QMK project on Cherry MX keyboards, that more and more companies were starting to implement and rely on, instead of constantly reinventing the wheel and attempting to come up with their own proprietary software codebase.
- Keyboard CaseIt is great, sturdy and has a lot of room to tinker with the keyboard and add components as we see fit. Has metallic screws and metallic threaded holes, so should be able to witstand a lot of opening and closing, in case you want to tinker around over time. I would probably add another metallic screw to the bottom center, to hold the bottom plate more evenly to the top part. But it portruding a bit more than the two other ends is not the end of the world.
Now for the whole keyboard case, even by having this very sturdy metal frame, it can still flex a tiny bit. This is actually not a bad feature, because you may find that not all feet would make a contact on the table after installing them, and the keyboard would slightly tip if you would press it.
Giving the whole case a good hard twist would fortunately ensure that those would be evened out, and it will hold that shape perfectly after, without tipping around anymore.
Paint job is decent. It did chip over some edges, and not by shipping, but for instance after I took it a part, and put the components on the table and working with them. I noticed broken off flicks of paint after.
But nothing too serious I would care about too much. Most keyboards have a much stronger formula, and you need to put in effort to chip it. Joe says this is a design choice to look more like the classic IBM keyboards. I would personally still give it a proper coating, because I am personally not looking for faithful replication, but getting a very durable, repairable, and long lasting buckling spring keyboard, with a standard layout so it's convenient and very usable with my several decades developed muscle memory.
- The new Model F project generally.The new Model F has moddable and repairable components, metal case, capacitive bluckling spring switches, and standard layout!
The pricing is very reasonable imho, considering this is small niche product. Around 400 USD may sound like a lot for a keyboard, but search for "The Icebreaker" keyboard for instance. It costs 1,600 USD and it looks pretty awful to my tastes, plus the manufacturing is still not perfect, even while you would think everything would be for this price point.
If you want to get a capacitive buckling spring keyboard, your only other available option is to deal with the ever inflating ebay prices for the old Model F keybs, and 40 years of building up rust and wear. Plus dealing with the usb conversion, soldering, software, etc yourself.
Joe was trying to reduce this pricepoint to the minimum reasonable level so most people should by able to afford it who would want it, while focusing to maintain the best quality around the parts that really matter, like the mechanical components. This at least guarantees that in case the price is too inflated for the ebay offer, you can just get a brand new replica instead, that even have advantages compared to the old design.
All this being said, this is by far the best capacitive buckling spring keyboard I ever had! I’m eagerly waiting for my BSSK R2 too to arrive.
Any of us who are interested in capacitive buckling spring keyboards, or looking for a hard to get, or unique keycap/component that only Joe may have, is only winning from this whole project.
But it's not secret to anyone, that dealing with any areas of the buckling spring keyboards its a steep uphill battle, for a niche market at best. And it wouldn't exist in this form, or at all, if not for everyone's hard work and contributions. Thank you, you guys truly rock.
I hope my constructive contribution will help some people too, to outcome some of the harder challenges. Perhaps that they couldn't tackle so far.
