Help me making a wireless numpad <3

[Turbodruk]

Not quite sure if this is in the good place, but here it goes.

I'm looking to make my Tesoro Kailh Brown (yuck \0/) wireless. I have no experience in soldering, desoldering, programming or knowing how to replace the switches. I have made some photo's of the pcb of the numpad. Figured it can be easily desoldered and the USB cable can be pulled through the housing, leaving me with the pcb and plate + switches. First step probably will be making it wireless using (?) Bluefruit.







If anyone can help me make it wireless, that would be greatly appreciated!

The next step would be swapping out the Kailh Browns and replacing them with Gateron Greens. I have no clue on how to do this, as these are plate mounted switches. I will probably have to desolder these, right?



Having replaced the switches and made it Bluetooth (one can dream, thank you very much) I am in need of a new housing. I could use the old housing but I prefer something sleeker and not gamerish. What is the best way to make a housing for this, make one out of wood or go to the local miller and have one custom made from scratch using aluminum or some other metal?

Again, sorry if this is very noobish and so on, but I can't seem to find a wireless numpad (except for the discontinued Filco Tenkeypad Bluetooth) that irks me. Having this one collecting dust here, I figured I could mod it to an extent to suit my needs. Again, all help is very appreciated, thanks!

[Data]

Well you're going to need a battery for starters...

[Turbodruk]

Thinking about something like this.




if it works

[3K]

I guess you could take the wires which are used for the cable, solder them to a female USB port and plug in an bluetooth adapter. This should work shouldn't it?
Okay, forgot about the power.

But if you want a case you could start with making one out of wood. It's less expensive than alu.

[suicidal_orange]

I'm not an expert on wireless options but after a read about the bluefruit it seems it accepts actual keys (but only 12 of them - not enough) or keypresses over serial from a standard microcontroller, but not USB.

Looks like your numberpad has a separate PCB for the controller and switches?  If so step one would be to replace the controller with a Teensy or Arduino, then you can connect that to the bluefruit as detailed here.  Be sure to avoid using the serial pins for the switches...

That thread is old which doesn't make it wrong but does mean they've had years to make an all in one solution with more pins for switches, so if you haven't bought the bluefruit yet it's worth looking for alternatives.

When it comes to the case metal will block the wireless so you're looking at wood or acrylic and the plate is solid so you will need to desolder the switches.

Fun first project

[Turbodruk]

Great, thanks! I'm not sure about the pcb being seperate from the controller, am at work so I can't check right now. But I think it's seperate which means I can use a teensy and make it wireless. Will probably make a case out of wood, just haven't had any great ideas yet.

Thanks for te help so far!

[Turbodruk]

The PCB and the controller are one. This is bad news I guess? That would mean no wireless possibilities or....

[suicidal_orange]

That's a shame but not surprising.  There are always options though!

As you're replacing the switches anyway you could desolder them, put the new switches in the plate and handwire them to a teensy and put the old switches back in the PCB, which could be useful elsewhere?

Another option would be using a teensy as a USB reciever to serial output (you can make a USB-USB to convert any board programmable, this would be a twist on that) which could then be sent on to the bluefruit, but I'm not sure you'd manage to power three chips on USB power or fit it all in a reasonable sized case.

Option three would be cutting the controller part of the current PCB off and attaching the switch part to a teensy, would need pics to know if that would work.  There may also be health risks cutting PCB...

[Turbodruk]

This is the pcb's back. Curious, cutting pcb bad for your health? Why so?

So the best would be to salvage the plate, hand wire it with new keys, slab a teensy on that sucker and wire a bluefruit to it? I think I can do that (giving enough spare time and watching videos probably)

[suicidal_orange]

PCBs are made of fiberglass, you're not supposed to inhale the dust created when you cut them but seems it's not an instant death sentence so just wear something over your mouth if you do.

The section of PCB you've posted looks very busy - a little keypad only needs 9 connections to the controller and pretty sure I can see more than that, and I'm not seeing any diodes so probably each switch has a pin so so it's best left in one piece anyway.

Teensy, handwire and bluefruit is looking good unless you've not bought the bluefruit and are a coder so can help this guy get this all-in-one working?  Should be smaller which means more room for a battery.