Great/Interesting Finds

[TNT]

So at least there're two variants existing, hall effect and ITW switches respectively?

I doubt if we could distinguish from just observing keycaps.

Spoiler:

31E05592-D650-4702-9873-0B4EA0606663.jpeg

This one has the ITW switches. Honeywell mount, so indistinguishable by caps.

IMG_20220322_155343.jpg (2.33 MiB) Viewed 6727 times

[John Doe]

So at least there're two variants existing, hall effect and ITW switches respectively?

I doubt if we could distinguish from just observing keycaps.

Spoiler:

31E05592-D650-4702-9873-0B4EA0606663.jpeg

This one has the ITW switches. Honeywell mount, so indistinguishable by caps.

IMG_20220322_155343.jpg

Wish its hall effect keeb as I really want one but ITW is aswell cool, I also won one from seller's auctions and its in the mail still, lets see if we could convert it.

[Palatino]

Never mind - I just bought one rather than risk they ran out (when I sent through an offer there were 7 competing offers - clearly a lot of interest) £24 is a good price to try a new switch. I passed up the chance to get an Alps Buckling Spring board recently which I half regret, but they are said to be heavier than Model M springs, whereas Syncan are lighter, which suits me better.

Well, I actually don't mind the key feel Kinda bindy where you'd expect though. Two of the caps/barrels are pretty dry and they just stay depressed - need lube'n! My favourite thing about this board is the fact that it comes with a floppy disk. I miss floppy discs.

PXL_20220317_211156518.jpg

I changed my order to the beige one before he sent the blue. No binding on mine! In fact, it’s pretty darn nice to type on. Good crunchy feel, nice light weighting. I did swap some springs around, harvesting from the numpad, as a few alphabetical keys were registering without a click, but overall it’s a great board for £20. I can’t stop using it. It’s the keyboard equivalent of cracking my knuckles.

[TNT]

Wish its hall effect keeb as I really want one but ITW is aswell cool, I also won one from seller's auctions and its in the mail still, lets see if we could convert it.

I think they're a little less thocky than honeywells, but also bit lighter. Still very nice! Definitely interested in converting this one

[Sheepless]

Never mind - I just bought one rather than risk they ran out (when I sent through an offer there were 7 competing offers - clearly a lot of interest) £24 is a good price to try a new switch. I passed up the chance to get an Alps Buckling Spring board recently which I half regret, but they are said to be heavier than Model M springs, whereas Syncan are lighter, which suits me better.

Well, I actually don't mind the key feel Kinda bindy where you'd expect though. Two of the caps/barrels are pretty dry and they just stay depressed - need lube'n! My favourite thing about this board is the fact that it comes with a floppy disk. I miss floppy discs.

PXL_20220317_211156518.jpg

I changed my order to the beige one before he sent the blue. No binding on mine! In fact, it’s pretty darn nice to type on. Good crunchy feel, nice light weighting. I did swap some springs around, harvesting from the numpad, as a few alphabetical keys were registering without a click, but overall it’s a great board for £20. I can’t stop using it. It’s the keyboard equivalent of cracking my knuckles.

Sadly, it looks to me like some of the extra keys on these 'Heroic' keyboards won't be usable via Soarer's converter. For example, the 'stop' button (above F7) sends E0 44, which (according to hid_listen) Soarer's initial fixed translation converts to 00. That initial translation takes place before the remap phase, and I'm not aware of a way to work around this.

Edit: it looks to me like the following are all mapped to 00 (unassigned) by Soarer: Close, Game, VCD, DVD, Stop, Fast forward, Mute, Xfer. Also, the Fn key does nothing.

[Muirium]

Presumably QMK etc. (I have honestly lost count of all these TMK forks) can handle this instead of Soarer.

I like TMK’s mouse keys, for instance. Soarer never got around to those.

He’s still the simplest and best configured by default. But that’s not the whole story, as you see.

[dr-lipschitz]

Datanetics DC-60 switches https://www.ebay.com/itm/224253664407

[Sheepless]

Presumably QMK etc. (I have honestly lost count of all these TMK forks) can handle this instead of Soarer.

I like TMK’s mouse keys, for instance. Soarer never got around to those.

He’s still the simplest and best configured by default. But that’s not the whole story, as you see.

Probably TMK/QMK would be a better solution. But, for now, I've just patched the translation table in Soarer, so now I have all the extra buttons sending codes.

I already have media keys on a buckling spring keyboard, thanks to normally using an F122, but this keyboard will do when I want to save a little desk space.

[Muirium]

Patched? How exactly did you do that? Edit the hex file directly?

[Sheepless]

Essentially, yes. Figured out where in the binary the table for "E0 xx" codes is, and modified the hex file accordingly.

[Muirium]

Changed them to what? Just spread them out a bit into the hex-space? How do you use them with scas I wonder?

[Sheepless]

In a couple of cases, the choices were obvious. The 'Stop' and 'Mute' buttons were unassigned (hid_listen showed them being mapped to zero), but Soarer's codes.html shows 0xEA and 0xEC for MEDIA_STOP and MEDIA_MUTE, respectively, so I chose those. In other cases, the choice to make was less obvious, so I was pretty arbitrary. For example, consulting codes.html, I chose 0xAB (AUX1) for the 'Close' button. Now suppose (just for the sake of illustration) I wanted to map this to 0x67 (PAD_EQUALS, a numpad key not present on this numpad). I could then have this in the config:

Code: Select all

ifset any
ifkeyboard any
ifselect any
remapblock
layer 0
        AUX1 PAD_EQUALS
endblock

I ended up with this chunk of Intel hex format for addresses 0x1b0 to 0x22f:

Code: Select all

:1001B000C20000000000000000F500000000000088
:1001C00000F9E60000E4E80088F600000000000006
:1001D000E3FEEF0075000000E7FD0000FA000000FC
:1001E00065FC00F0ABEB000066FB00F7EA000000E6
:1001F000A9F80000ACEA000000AD0054EC00E900F2
:1002000000F500000000000000000058000000AAF7
:1002100000AE00000000000000004D00504A000049
:10022000AF494C51004F52000000004E00464B4871

So I prepared a .hex file with that replacing the corresponding lines in Soarer_at2usb_v1.12_atmega32u4.hex, and reflashed my Teensy. Replugged it, and used hid_listen to confirm that everything was as expected.

[Muirium]

Cool!

Seeing as this is page bazillion of DT's longest thread, I'm bookmarking this for future reference: Hexmod. That way I'll be able to find it with a DT search when I get similar desires.

[Sheepless]

The only slightly tricky bit about the above is that you have to fix the checksum (last byte) on each changed line. It's a simple bit of programming.

[mmm]

So at least there're two variants existing, hall effect and ITW switches respectively?

I found out the hard way, at least three. I was convinced I would finally get my hands on a nice MS keyboard that I wouldn't know how to convert, instead I got a foam&foil keyboard I don't know how to convert instead

Spoiler:

Haven't converted one myself, but I think you might be able to just wire the capsense matrix to either an Xwhatsit or commonsense controller depending on the layout of the columns/rows. It's times like these that PCB design skills would be priceless as it would be super simple to just replace the PCB - presuming PCB design itself could be aided by something like a scaled scan of the original PCB to place the layout of the capsense pads I would think? A project like that definitely is more doable if a lot of people have the same board that they want to convert so that you can make a batch of them to make the price and time spent each more reasonable as a group buy of sorts. Someone did this with 3277 beamspring PCBs at one time and that went pretty well.

Thanks for the suggestion! It seems like I may be the only one with one of these in the keytronic version, so might not be worth it to make a custom pcb. However it seems straightforward to wire the rows/columns directly to capsense controller. It still needs some fresh foam, as the foam seem to have shrunk quite a bit, even though the board is in pristine condition. I might give some protocol-engineering a go before attempting with the capsense controller (and hope that this is not one of those 1-key rollover protocols ).

So at least there're two variants existing, hall effect and ITW switches respectively?

I doubt if we could distinguish from just observing keycaps.

Spoiler:

31E05592-D650-4702-9873-0B4EA0606663.jpeg

This one has the ITW switches. Honeywell mount, so indistinguishable by caps.

IMG_20220322_155343.jpg

I was hoping to get my hands on one of the ITW versions, but the price inflated to more than I was willing to pay The unit today went for 251 euros. Seems like a nice unit, I hope you manage to get it up and running!

Another one that looks cool, but isn't:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334317457012

(Silly price too...)

edit: images added for posterity if not eternity. It's called Microangelo apparently.

Gorgeous keyboard, the decimal point just needs to be knocked to the left

[NeK]

I was watching this auction and was surprised to see the selling price. I know it’s a great blue alps board but I didn’t think it commands such a high price. Is there something I’m missing here?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-VINTAGE-A ... 3795488681

chyros said it's good = absurd price (even though it's still mediocre at best)

I would say that it's the best keyboard I have. And it's not because chyros said it, but it actually is. There is something about its shape, the keycaps and the combination of blue alps that it propels it to the top. Is it worth 700+$?? no, of course not. no keyboard should worth that kind of money. But hey, that's the craziness of the markets, just take a look at how much beamsprings go for. Now THAT is crazy.

[Polecat]

Monterey K104W:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/203833723534

Only the very late K104s had Windows keys. This one almost certainly has Hua-Jie Alps clones and lasered caps, but these have a heavily built case and metal plate, so they're a good starting point for an Alps swap.

[kbdfr]

[…] Only the very late K104s had Windows keys. This one almost certainly has Hua-Jie Alps clones and lasered caps, but these have a heavily built case and metal plate, so they're a good starting point for an Alps swap.

I don't know what "Huad-Jie Alps clones" are (and am a dedicated Cherry fanboy anyway )
but I always enjoy how DT members share their vast keyboard knowledge.

[Polecat]

I don't know what "Huad-Jie Alps clones" are (and am a dedicated Cherry fanboy anyway )
but I always enjoy how DT members share their vast keyboard knowledge.

Thanks, I shouldn't be so lazy about posting links. I just checked the wiki and the K104 page has been updated with some info on the Windows version since I found and posted mine originally:

wiki/Monterey_K104

The Hua-Jie switches are documented also:

wiki/Hua-Jie_AK_series

Here's my original post from when this model was still " yet to be sighted":

viewtopic.php?f=62&t=22545

Interesting that mine has a serial number only four units away from the one on ebay, since this is not where I got mine.

[webwit]

IBM5110-3 pc with beamspring, floppy and printer, plus IBM Model M industrial keyboard.

https://www.marktplaats.nl/v/computers- ... -ibm5110-3

[hypkx]

Alps mount keycaps:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/ALPS-Computerta ... 634-2357-0

[Slom]

So at least there're two variants existing, hall effect and ITW switches respectively?

I doubt if we could distinguish from just observing keycaps.

Spoiler:

31E05592-D650-4702-9873-0B4EA0606663.jpeg

This one has the ITW switches. Honeywell mount, so indistinguishable by caps.

IMG_20220322_155343.jpg

A curvy tick on the Q is good sign that it is not Micro Switch, as is a fully rounded 3.

[TNT]

https://www.ebay.de/itm/294900792565?_t ... 0167.m2940

This one: wiki/Sperry_UNIVAC_UDS-2000_2502

[meanderingthalweg]

Never seen this before… can anyone elaborate on this beauty?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-VINTAGE-M ... 4317457012

[Muirium]

Microangelo? Nice name!

[Polecat]

Never seen this before… can anyone elaborate on this beauty?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-VINTAGE-M ... 4317457012

Keytronics foam and foil, see here and scroll up a bit:

viewtopic.php?p=501474#p501474

[Rbd_3178]

link
Key Tronic Model F clone? Bottom row doesn't look like one in the photo on the wiki.

[xxhellfirexx]

Key Tronic Model F clone? Bottom row doesn't look like one in the photo on the wiki.

Yes. The FT## sticker in the bottom right means it's Keytronic.

[webwit]

Three beamspring keyboards for 2500 euro plus more...
https://www.marktplaats.nl/v/computers- ... liefhebber

[Heikkonen]

I would def bite but the shipping cost is just way too much