As I've posted
in another thread, I am right now looking for a carry-around board for daily usage, and particularly concerned about my unusually high needs for ruggedness and stability. I have already identified the Cherry G80-1800 I received from Ascaii as a very possible candidate judging by the size and the blue MX switches I swapped into it, but the testing has only started, and my concerns about its rather simplistic construction (read: plastic case, PCB, no reinforement whatsoever) aren't quite overcome.
So I bought myself some unknown keyboard from ebay.de, thinking that just maybe it could help with improvements on the G80-1800 or maybe even turn out to just be a somewhat reinforced G8x-1800, which it does resemble quite a bit.
Overall, the case felt rather promising - a lot heavier and more stable than the Cherry 1800. The rear looked promising, too, a lot of screws and a rather solid cable grip.
Model 102 W, Made on the 30th of August 1991 by DS Keyboard Technic GmbH, Radolfzell/Germany. In fact, the
company does still exist, and they seem to be still selling exactly the same model, advertising their membrane technology - so after all, it's not THAT obscure a thing as my thread titles tries to make it appear, lureing you in to have a look at my blurry crap-pics of doom. I do like the address sticker, by the way - my father used to have exactly the same when I was younger, using it to "stamp" letters and such. I guess you could get them very cheaply and readily in Germany at some point. Very classy to use that sort of thing on an industrial keyboard - it pretty much whispers "Gerda, do you mind if I borrow some of those letter stickers you girls use in the office? I just ran out of our official logo stickers, you know..." to me.
Pulling the keys reveals doubleshots - YAY! And a connector that looks like Cherry MX, covered in a rubber membrane - or does it? Nope, since it's exactly the other way around on these, male part on keycap and female part on keystem. Bugger.
Let's open the case then, and see what lurks inside...
A custom-made PCB. Oh dear. With crappy soldering. And coming from the king of "that'll do"-soldering, that does mean something. *I* don't leave PCBs with so many cold spots or as dirty as they come from this factory (or to be fair, perhaps it was repaired at one point by a technician during his lunch break). The black stuff on the second pic below, that is soldering residue, a lot of it.
Oh dear. Have a look at the top then, all caps removed. A rather thick and quality-feeling rubber sheet, also serving as a lid to waterproof the PCB.
Under the rubber mat, we have buttons...
The buttons from the underside reveal some stabilizer bars. Didn't expect that at this point anymore, to be honest, but I didn't have the chance to look at too many waterproof industrial keyboards' internals yet.
And on the actual keyboard, we find another rubber membran.
So, obviously, I've no idea what to do with that thing. The case might be G80-1800 compatible, the keycaps obviously aren't - though they might be made to fit by cutting the button stems, but well - they are nice, but not all that interesting, also they have smaller Enter, Backspace and Alt, which I don't care for too much...
Any ideas, comments, buying offers?
Chris
