Orbweaver...trials and tribulations...

[SecretV]

Over the years I've kept using my Orbweaver and occasionally it will just stop working as intended, requiring a full reboot of the system in order for layers and lighting to come back online. This happened quite frequently when I first bought it and is eventually what led me down the path of creating my first Dactyl. Lately I've been wondering about shoving a teensy inside the orbweaver and having it control the actual switches while retaining the chroma functionality through synapse. This led me to taking it apart and noticing what appears to be a 3731 chip on the switch board. Can anyone confirm this? There also appears to be an lpc11u24f as the brains of the whole thing with what appear to be pads for a jtag of some sort. Does anyone one know if that arm microcontroller is supported by any open source keyboard firmware? Cursory searches just bring up a single hackaday article. Reprogramming the built in microcontroller would be preferable than what I was planning. The plan was to cut up the conductors related to the switches and solder them to a teensy. Solder the stock USB wiring to a PCB USB hub and feed both microcontrollers through the hub. This would have the benefit of having all switches controlled via the teensy and only the lighting effects be controlled by synapse. If for whatever reason synapse fails it will only hurt the keypads flair and leave my keypad layout in tact and able to switch between layers.

[SecretV]

I've gone ahead and proceeded with wiring in a separate microcontroller for the switches. I'm waiting for the pcb usb hubs from retrocution.  Tapping into the switch signals is pretty straightforward. There are available points on the main keypad to solder wires to. I've mapped out the thumb cluster to the individual conductors for its connector. This has allowed me to tap into those keys from the connecter wires vs having to route additional wires into the thumb cluster and cutting holes to route said wires.  I have not wired up the thumb LEDs as I don't know exactly how QMK works for LED Matrix of they would even work as an LED matrix. There is also the added concern of not knowing what the forward voltage coming from the Teensy would be. I also decided to print out a modification for the lower thumb button and since I am tapping straight into the connector it was simple enough to just solder directly onto the pads for the omron switch. The orbweaver is row driven.

A few images can be found here

The .STL for the thumb button mod can be found here

For anyone interested in here's what I've mapped out so far


Thumb Switches
 

Conductors Column/Row	Diode	Switch	Descriptive Name
Blue/Light Green	D52	SW27	Thumb hat Forward
Green/Light Green	D50	SW26	Thumb hat Aft
Purple/Light Green	D48	SW25	Thumb hat Downward
White/Light Green	D46	SW24	Thumb hat Upward
Grey/Pink	D53	SW?	Lower Thumb Button
Grey/Light Green	D44	SW?	Upper Thumb Button

Thumb LEDs

Conductor	Resistor	Diode	Conductor 2	Descriptive Name
3.25v Yellow	R37	D41	.18v Orange	Center
3.25v Yellow	R38	D42	.57v Red	Forward
3.25v Yellow	R40	D43	.14v Brown	Aft

[SecretV]

I finished doing what I'm going to do with this project. I suppose I now have a stealth orbweaver . No lighting but key switches all work. For those interested in what the inside looks like here's an image.

[suicidal_orange]

I thought the Orbweaver was a mouse, clearly not!

Good work - and proof that gamers don't need RGB on everything

[SecretV]

To be fair I wanted to keep the rgb (like a true poser) but I think I might have let the magic smoke out of the main controller (longish black pcb).  Here's the finished key pad now that I'm done messing with it. I used some left over keys from another keyboard build. Currently I'm using the F6 key in the lower left as my layer switching key. I debated adding a micro switch but couldn't really figure out where I'd want the extra key.