Robotron K7673.09

HaaTa · 06 Nov 2016, 20:22

While not new to our glorious wiki, it's a rather nice looking keyboard that hasn't been posted in quite a while. The serial number seems rather early as well, 529. Built some time in 1989, East Germany, before the wall fell.

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The switches are not that great really. Scratchy, bind if you press too far off center and use graphite contacts.
Looking at the force curve you can clearly see the effect of the two spring system.

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Flickr Album

Wiki: wiki/Robotron_K7673

seebart · 06 Nov 2016, 20:34

Ugh very nice, I never knew these Robotron's were so interesting. Considering I can get them easily like tons of boring Cherry boards being in Germany I should get one of these. Nice, thanks for sharing. But that "lens on a chip" is funky.

Ratfink · 06 Nov 2016, 20:47

Very cool-looking board. Shame the switches don't feel very good.

Man, they sure were stingy with the soldermask in East Germany.

ideus · 06 Nov 2016, 20:53

It has double shot with nice unique legends, the navigation icons, for example, are great; also, the layout it quite interesting, something we should learn for a future custom build, like the clean bottom row with just the space bar and two modifier keys.

pr0ximity · 11 Nov 2016, 22:27

Gah such beautiful pictures! Those traces are lovely

Hak Foo · 12 Nov 2016, 06:45

seebart wrote: Ugh very nice, I never knew these Robotron's were so interesting. Considering I can get them easily like tons of boring Cherry boards being in Germany I should get one of these. Nice, thanks for sharing. But that "lens on a chip" is funky.

The "lens on a chip" is probably a EPROM. Typically these have a label covering them when programmed, and you can remove it and blast the chip with UV light to reset the chip and re-program. I would cover it to preserve the programming if you expect to use it or dump the ROM at some later time.

OleVoip · 12 Nov 2016, 19:05

Exactly, that's what it is. The К573РФ2 (datasheet) was a soviet clone of the Intel C2716 EPROM: