Here is a video: Sound Comparison between Cherry MX Black, Cherry MX Clear, Jailhouse modded Cherry MX switches, Model F switches, Model switches.
I have a pretty good write up right now, but photos are in a mess thanks to one hard disk crash and one phone death in the past year. And I don’t think I’m using Imgur right. I named my photos and uploaded in alphabetical order but now they are a mess again. I’ll edit this thread again when I have time and sort out more photos. Just look at my album for now:
http://imgur.com/a/svJjg My mods
Everything I know was learned from others, and there are many awesome experts who have done very good jobs modding and have excellent threads to show.
Changing out the SDL connector for a teensy
He who must not be named at
http://imgur.com/a/CFKgY makes it very clear. This was how I learned to do USB mods on SDL connectors.
Do be aware, this is not for the inexperienced. These are vintage keyboards and old PCBs with tiny solder pads that you cannot afford to lift. By the time I started my first USB mod on a buckling spring, I had at least desoldered and resoldered 30 keyboards. I have never lifted a pad on any of the model Ms whose SDLs I desoldered, which I suspect is due to their superior construction and not my great desoldering.
As Ripster mentions, the last solder joint is always toughest. You should heat the joint and pry the SDL connector off with a screwdriver. Having done many SDL connectors, I firmly agree with Ripster. I don’t know if it is psychology or something mysterious but I always struggle with the last solder joint on every SDL connector.
Unlike Ripster I did not use nut and bolts to hold down the teensy. I used hot glue. The good thing is that this is totally reversible, in case you ever want to make changes. As fohat discovered to his disappointment, when he wanted to make changes to his epoxy-modded Model F he could not.
I also don’t believe in making things harder for myself. Why bother adding in another USB female plug, if the teensy itself already has one? By the time you ruin the mini USB female plug, it will be 10 years later and a Chinese imitation of teensy version 10 will be on the market for fifty cents. That will probably have mouse functions, its own onboard 1 teraflop processor and other goodies, so you can toss the older teensy and get Teensy 10.0.
Take a look at my Model F Ergodox pair. Works well, but takes up too much desk space and is also not that comfortable because of the space between some columns.
Now you may have noticed that I used one internal teensy (soldering) and one external teensy (ribbon cables). For the Model F 50, there is not enough space underneath the casing to drill a hole facing West/ left and position a teensy facing left. On my Model F 50 for the Right Hand, I needed the USB cable to run left because I have a big pile of books right in front normally. The legs of this keyboard are blocking a possible USB hole egress. So I mounted the teensy outside.
One thing about teensy with pins: I really like to use them, even if I choose to solder wires to the teensy legs! The reason is the pins make it so much easier to mount a teensy anywhere with hot glue. I try not to pour hot glue on the teensy itself – I try to glue to the teensy legs instead. Of course, a less-known reason, is that if you ever want to remove the teensy after hot gluing it, you need to be able to reach the glued parts of the teensy with an alcohol swab. If you do what some people do, like fixing the underside of a teensy without pins to a nut/bolt, then how are you going to reach it when you do want to remove the hot glue and take out the teensy? Easy to glue, not easy to remove.
As a guy who has misstuck his teensies multiple times, I thank hot glue. If it was epoxy, I would be so screwed. Gutz standard of clumsiness is such that I would probably dremel big holes in my Model Fs to detach a misstuck teensy.
The programming is straightfoward to do once you have gotten used to it. Notice that I have blue and gray labels on my Ergodox pair. Both have the same stock layout.
For the Model M-122s and F-122s, you don’t need soldering to attach a teensy since you can use ribbon cables and a teensy with pins. Some of my USB mods are done on teensy with pins, some on teensies. You don’t need to desolder because they use a belkin connector that is compatible with ribbon cables, rather than a soldered on SDL connector. There is plenty of space to put your teensy anywhere you like in most Model Fs.
Teensying the vast majority of Model Ms and Fs is easy. Model F Bigfoot, Model F Unsaver, Model M trackpoint are quite different. Teensying them is for experts – so I didn’t do it.
There is a photo that shows one experiment I made with SIP modding the SDL connector itself. Was just doing that for fun to see if I could make a system where you can pull off the SDL connector and stick in a teensy with pins. It works for the SDL connector! Unfortunately teensy with pins has pins that are too big for SIP sockets and I got tired searching for pins the right size to wire to the teensy.
Here are my jailhouse mods
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The correct size is known as ‘Switzerland’ H4 Elastics, 4mm (3/16”), heavy 4oz. Made by Dentsply GAC International. You can buy individual packs on Amazon for $5-6 although if you buy an entire box of 50 it is much better value. I can’t find the merchant who sold me the entire box anymore/ maybe I just don’t recognize that website appearance. I still have many packs and will be giving them out during my moving sale to anyone who buys my jailhoused boards.
Just hunt around here if you are planning on building lots of jailhoused boards.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/orthodontic-elastic-bands Pack of 50x100 is really cheap but there is not always someone selling.
I tried different sizes before figuring that out. Do not use ‘Japan’ or ‘Scandinavia’ which were taken with earlier tries. The photos taken with the green stem are Switzerland.
Take dental band.
Put it on stem.
Dental bands are not precision instruments, and may be larger or smaller. You have to discard larger ones that stick outside the plastic because they will impede the movement of the keystem. Or just push then extra rubber sticking out, back inside with your thumbnail. About 20% of each pack should not be used because they are just a teeny bit too big.
Screw the spring inside. DO NOT push the spring inside past the rubber bands. Spend 2-3 seconds rotating the spring into place. It makes for a far better fit.
Drop the switch cover down on top of the stem. Drop it to make sure it fits comfortably. This ensures that there is no rubber sticking outside your keystem. That’s why my photo shows me holding up the switch top as a test. The stem is clearly stuck if gravity can’t pull it down, and the dental band needs a bit of adjusting.
The rest should be straightforward. Put the stem back into the switch housing and you have a great switch! I started this project in 1Q2014, and now after 2 years, am pleased to report I am totally addicted to jailhouse switches.
The initial phase was problematic because I was poor at identifying switches that may get stuck in future. But after a while I got better at making these switches, and now no switch has ever gotten stuck in 6 months.
I jailhoused a bunch of keyboards and will offer them for an inexpensive price during my moving sale. Hopefully more people try this mod, get addicted, and voila, in 2017 everyone pounces on a kickstarter!
Switch moddable plate mod and Model F AT mod
Here is an example of my plate mod. I dremel a notch and paint it later. It’s a lot of work but kinda interesting. Excellent stress reliever, so every weekend I would dremel a hundred notches at least. The cutting wheel eats the metal up like… how you would like to cut up some nasty people in your life.
Here are photos from my Model F XT mod. It was awesome retracing etwentynine’s footsteps and liberating use of the alt keys under that overly long space bar. I also took advantage to switch to a standard modern space bar for my Model F XT. The space bar brackets are hot glued zinc strips. WCass recommends epoxy, but I really wanted to give myself room for error because I am less experienced than WCass.
My own experience with the spacebar mod for Model Fs suggests that it is better to install the new stabs with only one barrel in the plate – the spacebar itself. That way you have more control and space for your fingers to move and your glue gun to position. After you have tweaked the spacebar stabilizers properly, you can put all the barrels in and reassemble the Model F.
SIP socket Mod
Here is a SIP socket mod I did on my Deck, turning it into a Christmas tree. I can easily change the LEDs if I want. The paint job was less ideal but I had too many projects to care. I also wanted to see how long the paint job could last under normal usage conditions so I never vinyl modded it. Conclusion: an acrylic layer offers more protection. (Notice how some of the other painted keyboards in my ownership photos look good? I had some with transparent acrylic layers over normal paint.)
Poker Mod
Here is a video of my modded Poker. SIP mod, ergo clears, metal casing, awesome keycaps, the works. I am very proud of it. Big irony is I never use standard keyboards. It was just something I did to show myself that I can mod as well as any geek.
You may note that one or two keys don’t seem to light up. This seems to be a problem with the use of colour changing LEDs. No matter what I do, every new occasion when I connect the USB cable, some key will refuse to light up or else be very dim or super late in changing colours. This is an inconsistent problem to do with the transistors or resistors or whatever not feeding enough power to the LEDs all together ie changing this LED doesn’t help because next time it is another LED acting up. But it doesn’t seem to be a 2.2v/ 3.3v problem. When I change to all-3.3v clears, everything lighted up and stayed lighted for the two hours that I connected the keyboard to the computer for testing. The same went for all-2.2v LEDs (tried out on another Poker, not this one). But with colour changers the lighting is never consistent nor perfect.
One colour changer is awesome on its own, but a bunch together is not that great. I intend to sell this as-is, and let the buyer customize his own LEDs.
It is Good To Mod
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Three geekhackers screwed me last year. After that I vowed never to rely on others to do stuff. People are happy to take money from you but they are not so happy to do stuff or to return money. I strongly recommend all geekhackers to do their own mods. All information is publicly available, why pay others who take 2-3 years, produce nothing but excuses, and vanish or just refuse to answer PMs?
Adding Teensies to Model Fs
Here is a comparison I did between one of my F XTs and one of my F XT portables. Like all Model Fs these guys are easy to hook up to a teensy with pins, and there is space to put the teensy. No soldering required, just hot gluing!
By this point I am as competent a solderer as anyone else. But I still will avoid epoxying teensies whenever possible. Teensy 3 is out already, and in future years there may be better teensies. You need your modded stuff to be reversible to keep up with tech.
I really regret spending so much money on teensies. It is called death by a thousand (dollars) cuts. Because I didn’t buy all teensies in one shot, I didn’t get sticker shock, and so wound up spending what now seems to be a thousand dollars on these little monsters over 3 years. I’ll let the numbers geeks look at my selling threads and figure out for the amusement and edification of the geek public. And remember to add shipping, since on average I bought 3-4 teensies per purchase. I also occasionally bought individual teensies from geekhackers who happened to be selling other things at the same time.
