geekhack
geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: Azure Flash on Wed, 12 February 2014, 15:47:42
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I went to a pawn shop I'd never been to before today and looked at their old 5$ keyboards. The majority (2 out of 3, yes they only had 3 keyboards) were genuine garbage, but one felt kinda nice and had an unusual stem as well as AT interface. It's branded as QTronix QX-101, and I've googled that but couldn't find anything, so I thought it would warrant a little thread on here. I've disassembled it and discovered this:
[attach=2]
Has anyone seen this before? It looks like it's technically a rubber dome keyboard, but I've never seen one where all the domes are just freestanding like that. It doesn't look very economical. It does, however, feel markedly nicer than your run-of-the-mill keyboard. The construction is kinda neat. In the picture above you can see there are two colors of domes, the white ones are probably stiffer (the enter key has a white dome too).
[attach=1]
There are a bunch of hooks which the conductive membrane slides into, then a plastic back (which can just barely be seen in the upper right corner) slides on top and is screwed in four places. I would've taken more photos to show how the conductive membrane itself bends into the controller, the controller itself, the AT interface, the white cylindrical stem with a cross in it, and the layout featuring a bigass Enter key (eww), but my ****ty camera died on me. It stops working when batteries reach 1.4V instead of 1.5V...
I ordered an AT to PS/2 adapter as well as a key puller (those keys are harder to pull out of their cylinder than rubber dome keyboards and more fragile than my Model M's keycaps, so I guess I need one here) so in 2-3 weeks I'll clean it, try it out and maybe take more pictures if the interest is still there (both mine and this forum's).
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Do you have pictures of the label or the keycap undersides?
I've found out from the DT wiki that QTronix is now iOne (http://deskthority.net/wiki/Qtronix). And this keyboard kind of looks like this QTronix QX-901 (http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=45042.0).
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I got some other batteries that work, so yes I can give you a picture of the label and layout:
Label
[attach=1]
Layout
edit: I hadn't noticed how SMALL that backspace key is! LMAO
[attach=2]
It looks like it's the same kind of switch as the QX-901 but the stem is different. Odd.
Video of me typing (converted to webm, 14MB to 0.6MB, wow! ffmpeg to the rescue as always)
[attach=3]
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Discrete conductive domes over single-layer membrane. I had a Dell keyboard like that once (I don't recall if it was dome over PCB or membrane, but I had to keep hooking out domes and cleaning them after they stopped passing current), and I think I had an office keyboard similar to that at one stage. I think the original Apple iMac keyboard also had discrete domes, as did the Alps AppleDesign keyboard, although the latter certainly was pressure dome (three-layer membrane).
I've seen that design of slider before, or something very similar — I thought alps.tw had some photos of a Chicony or some such board with those switches, but I don't have the page bookmarked.
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I'm such a dumbass, I already had an AT to PS/2 adapter, AND an IC puller that works fine for pulling keys. Oh well, in about a month I'll have spares. So I tested it and it works 100%, and I started taking the keycaps apart to clean it, for some reason. It's not like this is replacing my IBM Model M13 or anything... But hell, this keyboard is filthy. My camera's white balance made this keyboard look a lot cleaner in the previous photos than it actually was. Even the following photo has had a metric fμckton of dust bunnies emancipated. And now, behold...
[attach=1]
Stabilizer bars errywhere in this bìtch! The three long numpad keys don't have any bars, but there are slots for them... And since Caps Lock and Tab don't have slots at all, I'm assuming this keyboard is missing three stabilizer bars. I can't imagine who would take or lose three stabilizer bars, though, so it could be an intentional omission though, who knows. Official count: 5 bar stabilizers in 4 keys. Is this a record? :p
BTW, what do you guys use for cleaning keyboards? I like Cyberclean because I'm lazy, but I'm open to suggestions for clever methods to clean between those keys efficiently.