Custom mechanical keyboard PCB - Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-09-13 12:25 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
>
>> On Sep 13, 2016, at 09:16, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
>>
>> Unfortunately, the guys building new Cherry keyboards fabricate new keytops for
>> Windows extended keyboards, and not ASCII (ie. VT-100 style) or ANSI (VT-220 style)
>> so unless you want to spring the cash to have 500 sets of keytops made, you can't
>> even make a practical replacement.
>>
>
> I've investigated making a custom mechanical keyboard upgrade for my old TRS-80 Color Computers. Custom printing on Cherry MX keycaps is available and somewhat practical for one-off keyboards. The limitation is that you're stuck with the keycap widths available in each row of a sculpted Windows-like keyboard. In the case of the CoCo keyboard I contemplated, I could not exactly match the widths of all of the non-1x1 key caps of the original keyboard, but I was able to come up with an alternate layout that I think would have been serviceable.
>
> If you are not opposed to making a custom PCB to stuff with Cherry MX keyswitches, then you  have a lot of freedom. Not full freedom due to limitations of available widths in each row, but still quite a bit.
>

Maybe you can get some ideas from this (somewhat tasteless) project?

https://hackaday.io/project/13210-the-fsociety-keyboard

--Toby