So, I scored this Chicony KB-5581 at a local thrift store for like $5.00. I cleaned it up, hooked it up and it worked...for one night. The next morning the LEDs blinked some but the keyboard wasn't being recognized by my computer at any point, pre or post OS loading. Then the LEDs stopped working altogether and as far as I can tell that's all she wrote. I was going to recycle it, but decided to pop off a few caps and see what was underneath:
Hey hey, not too bad for a first mech keyboard score! So, that being the case, I thought "Maybe it just needs new caps?" I took a photo of the board showing all the capacitors that I can see:
Most seem to be ceramic and so are probably fine as I understand it. There seem to be around four or five that might need replacing. The only other thing I see that could be suspect is the grey cylinder towards the top of the board, between the scroll lock LED and the arrow keys. I don't know components well enough to tell if that's some kind of resistor, or fuse perhaps? It doesn't strike me as being a cap, but then, I just said I don't know too much about components.
What do you guys think? Is it worth the effort and am I headed in the right direction? If it matters, there was no "bzzzt" event and all the magic smoke is still inside the components. This keyboard's demise came not with a bang, but a fizzle.
Thanks for any help!
