deskthority

tl;dr: I accidently damaged my Pokers PCB and repaired it by hand wiring the switches and putting a teensy inside.

Pics

I was never really satisfied with the programmability of my Poker 2. Initially I had hoped that replacing the firmware should be possible somehow. But after some research I quickly realized this was not as easy as I thought and I finally gave up on the task...

...Until a few weeks ago, when I accidently damaged my Pokers PCB. At first I thought I could repair it but thanks to my soldering skills damaged it even more.

So I started putting a teensy in it.

Steps to reproduce:

• Cut all traces connecting the switches from the PCB. I've done this with a box cutter but in hindsight I should've used a dremel.
• Remove a chunk of the PCB right under the spacebar. This is where the Teensy will go.
• Solder the switches to the PCB.
• Now handwire everything. Matrices and stuff.
• Add a teensy and put TMK on it.

I kept the PCB because I feel like the combination of the plate and the PCB in the Poker make it feel extremely solid. Also, since the case is attached to the PCB, this made things a lot easier.

To my surprise this actually works quite well. I only wish I had used a dremel to cut the traces on the PCB. Because putting pressure on the box cutter cut traces tends to reconnect them. I had to do a lot of "recutting" and since the traces are on both sides of the PCB this can not only be a real pain but also quite difficult.

Also wiring the original USB port to the Teensy was a real pain.

it looks like you had some help from spider man

great job btw!

Haha. Yeah. I had to add a lot of hot glue to prevent shorts. And being the impatient person I am, I had to do it really quick (just like the rest of this mod). Therefore the spider silk.

Well done !

Do you have considered to keep the switches/diodes matrix from pcb and only wire the pcb matrix to the teensy pins?

Actually I've never really considered using the original matrix. That's because my Poker accident involved destroying some of the original traces. Repairing them and figuring out the original matrix seemed like a lot more work than just wiring a new one by hand.