Sven Petersen

I have bought mine from Voelkner at ebay.

Your table looks a bit like mine (which is really retro and >150 years old).

Don’t cut your fingers. And you need a cool print on a foil to laminate on the enclosure, I guess. 🙂

I don’t really like those, I also have an extractor, but I still don’t like it a lot, so I usually use a screw driver. I was sporadically looking for this kind of tool and finally saw this one on youtube.

I was watching a live stream of @morefunmakingit.bsky.social some days ago, when I have seen this tool on his desk. I didn’t know that it existed, before. I then did a short research and had ordered it, before the live stream was over. #goatsFoot #pryBar #Wera #Wera127456

The LaserPecker LP3. The engraving of one tray takes 2 minutes, the preparation another 4-5 minutes.

Birth of some C64 keycaps. I have made the trays to speed up the process. If you screw up, you screw up 9 key caps at once 🙂

Because he will want to sell his Blingboard64. My extra is the Kernal Switcher and the use as a USB keyboard for VICE, if it is not connected to a C64. Since I liked the challenge, it even supports a WS2812B LED strip. The two extra keys are for switching kernals or LED patterns.

Thanks. It is an interesting project. The goal is to enable people to make their own keyboard without „the curse of the key caps“. No mechanical keyboard project has tackled this, yet. Maybe CBMstuff. But I think, the keycaps might not be commercially available.

I also want to try dye sublimation. If that works, I could print the keycaps on a sheet with that ink, people could make their own keycaps with some kind of heater, like an temperature controlled hair straightener. That is still a matter of research. I already have the printer.

The layout etc. will be on github. The keycaps are still a challenge, though. A facebook friend in Germany is printing keycaps with a UV printer, which is probably the best option. I could make low volumes, like one set per month, with the fiber laser.

Seems, those are the keys, which are breaking most often. I could only offer HELP.

Last weekend, I have found Raspberry Pi Pico 2W and I intended to upgrade my PicoCalc. I was aware, that the display might break, if I am not careful. When I finally assembled it, I have moved the mainboard a bit, pulled the display out of place and it broke. A replacement is already on its way.

I‘ll check my salvaging keyboard tomorrow.

I have once screwed up a whole batch of TI demo boards, which were built in my company. I had modified the layout and forgot to pack the inner layers into the gerber zip file, because I received a phone call while preparing production data. Of course they were fully assembled 🤣🤣🤣

Testing the latency in USB keyboard mode with VICE and David’s Midnight Magic. This succss when there is latency. 120/sec scan rate feels as good as the regular keyboard. I have also added VICE soft and hard reset and attach disk and cartridge image to the additional two buttons.

The disadvantage of the solder pot is the long time, that is required to heat it up.

At work, the guy at the (a bit more advanced) solder pot was my best friend 🙂

The broken Pro Micro is good enough for practicing with the solder pot. Quite nice for desoldering multi pin components. You need to mask with kapton tape, what you want to keep. Flux is helpful, too.

Bought the C64 style key caps from Crazy Ali in January in the hope, I could do something meaningful with it. I have also ordered this keyboard, recently, because I really need a US layout keyboard. Now I have put the keycaps on. Nice keyboard. The original keycaps were not any bad.

Sure. It is cheaper to remap the ROM than changing the hardware. I always tend to think of mass production 🙂

Well, they did it in the C16. You could move it to these positions and move the pound key and the @ beside the space bar. Del and home in the position of the old cursor keys position. etc. you don’t need to remap the ROM. A drop in replacement keyboard is the best choice.

Yes, that, I did not consider. You are right.

The new cursor keys could pull The bases of two transistors high, which are parallel to the shift key switch and the respective cursor key switch.

Hmm… you could put a 2U right shift beside the 7U spacebar, reduce the left left shift to 1U, to move the bottom keys left 1/2U left to get space for two new cursor keys. It would require some transistor trickery, I think.

Everything in history eventually comes to an end. E.g. the NSDAP didn’t survive the fail Austrian painter for a long time. Time is ticking. They have bet on the wrong horse.

I usually give jobs to AI, that I don’t like, like reading old handwritings, or recently, creating a lookup table for the scan codes for the C64 keyboard (row&column -> scan code). Well, usually, the result is buggy. It is our future.

I have constructed a frame around it, so it is compatible with the original.

You don‘t want a kernal switch or reset beside the space bar. That would be a major source of fuck up (and I would be a champion of it). I suffer from the „stupid hands disease“.

I first thought of connecting my extra buttons to C= and Shift, so they would be perfect for playing David’s Midnight Magic pinball. But it would just be useful for that. So I thought, it should be somehow connected to the pro micro. Now it’s for kernal switching with RESTORE etc.

How will you make the user definable keys work? I have connected my keyboard matrix to a pro micro via a pcf8575 io expander, but that is way too slow. Probably a raspberry pi pico with more pins and more power would do that job.