4 Apr
2011
4 Apr
'11
5:28 a.m.
--- On Mon, 4/4/11, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
The anti-static bag had enough conductivity to do the
job? I would never have suspected that.
Yup! It worked perfectly. The keyboard contacts are capacitive, rather than a standard
switch. You don't want something like aluminum foil that's truly a conductor. I
actually tried several materials, including this super thin shiny mylar thermal barrier
stuff they use at work. The anti-static bag worked perfectly. Another plus is that
anti-static circuit board bags are very easy to find, especially in their natual habitat
of my basement. Note that I used the shiny silver, semi-translucent kind. I somehow doubt
that the clear pink kind or the clear with black lines kind would work as well.
I just picked up a Sun 4 keyboard on eBay, since they
apparently use the same keytronics arrangement
internally. Long run, I'm going to track down the
necessary tools to do fabricate from scratch. I have
several other old boxen with this style of keyboard, so
eventually I'll need to bite the bullet and learn how to do
it.
I thought of scavenging pads from a Sun keyboard, but at the same time, I've got type
4 keyboards that are starting to fail too. (speaking of which, I once had a rather
frightening experience trying to log in to a production server as root, it would not
accept my password, which I knew to be correct, although I could log in as another user.
Turns out the left shift key on the Type 4 keyboard on the console had failed - root's
password contained some capital letters, the user account did not.)
-Ian