[Photos & video] Zenith ZTX-11-Z

[zrrion]

EDIT: I have successfully programmed this and am using it as a daily driver for the time being. It is a great board and I like it very much.


I am in the process of hand wiring a Zenith ZTX-11-Z. So far all I have done is desoldered and removed the old PCB as well as rotate all switches to be the same orientation except for the space bar. You can't really rotate that switch or the slider gets in the way of the stabilizer, but it is also the only switch on that row so whatever.


As you can see I have swapped a few caps with my pingmaster in the back. Don't worry though, it is only temporary.


Closeup on the left side of the board where the interesting caps and the latching capslock are.


All the switches all lined up nice and neat. It was not particularly hard to remove them from the mounting plate.

The plan for this bad boy is to do as little external modification as possible. I think I can wire the save button on the back to the teensy so that pushing that let's me flash it, and I can use the phone connectors to work as a USB port for a USB cable made from a black glossy coiled phone cord.

pics of the back mostly

[green-squid]

Cool find man!

[andrewjoy]

Very nice, very nice indeed.

[ScottPaladin]

Very nice. I look forward to seeing the final product.

[zrrion]

I have finished all of the hand wiring that I can do while I wait on parts to get here. My first 2 rows are not the greatest, but I tried a new method of wiring it for the final 2 rows and it worked out very well so I will have to keep that in mind for the next time.


While the iron was hot I went ahead and took all of the guts out so that I could solder some wires to the push-button on the back. Eventually that'll let me reprogram the thing.


I also took a look at the pins for the jacks on the modem board and I will definitely be able to solder those up as usb once those parts get here (lots of waiting on parts at the moment.) Since I have 2 jacks on the back of this thing I have been thinking about what to do with the other one. I plan on leaving it wired to usb female so that I can expand on it later if I ever have a good idea of what to put there. If anyone has any ideas I am all ears.

[zrrion]

(the following text is being typed in the video.)
Hello Deskthority. This is my recording of me typing on my recently converted Zenith ZTX-11-Z. I am very happy with how it has turned out and it was a breeze considering that this was my first ever attempt at hand wiring and programming a keyboard. I have had a lot of fun with this thing. It types just as nicely as my Pingmaster but it pings considerably less which is nice. However the spacebar is louder and I am not sure the reason. It is a pretty long spacebar, at 9 units, so it might be the sound of the stabilizer wire vibrating or something, idk. At any rate this thing is super nice and I managed to do everything with it that I wanted to minus 1 thing, which is making the program button external. For whatever reason the thing would enter programming more regardless of if the external button was pressed or not. I was able to make a usb cable from a coiled phone cable and it looks pretty nice. It would look nicer, but the cable broke a little and I had to cut the shrink tube open to repair it so it no longer has nice shrink tube but rather has ugly electrical tape. All in all it feels like this thing will be my daily driver for a long time to come. The only thing I dislike about it is how high off of the desk the thing sits. I will need to invest in an actual wrist wrest for this.

[anthonymak]

I mod this keyboard with a custom pcb and is VIA /QMK compatible.

https://youtu.be/dbqh6UQ3lTY

[Muirium]

You didn't show the good stuff in the video! Let's see the PCB.

[anthonymak]

You didn't show the good stuff in the video! Let's see the PCB.

It is a prototype and there are a few amendments on it. but will not make a final one so just leave it as it is as the keyboard is working now.

see the photo of the pcb below.