I have been looking to get a Micro Switch keyboard for a long time, but they are rather scarce outside the US, and usually fetch quite high prices. I expected to find a SD board, or maybe even SW, but never would have imagined to find the much rarer RW switch.
IMG_2901 dirty keyboardThe board was very dusty when I got it, yet the switches were relatively smooth with a nice weighting similar to mx black. I will probably desolder a few for further cleaning to see whether it will improve anything. The case is made out of ~1.6mm steel, bent and welded at the edges. I don't have a working scale at the moment, but I guess the weight to be around 4-5kg.
Due to the sensing being conductive, it shouldn't be very difficult to create a replacement controller, or so I thought at least, until I noticed the absence of a traditional sensing matrix; instead, every switch shares a common connection on one pin, and an individual connection each on the other pin. This array of key positions then connects to a PCB with a matrix of diodes (which looks wonderful thanks to the gold plated traces), which appears to translate the one dimensional encoding of the sensing into a matrix. Ideally I would want to convert it in a least destructive way, which might just be handwiring in this case.
For now, here are 45 pictures of the mostly cleaned up keyboard in various states of disassembly on flickr.
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