I refuse to get better at taking pictures lol. Sometimes I think to move the keyboard to a good place with nice lighting and a clean background and other times it's just on my workbench as I'm messing with it.
From using Google translate on the back label on mine the words "Hengyu Computer Equipment Factory" show as well as a telephone number of 3336998 and a manufacture date of 9704 and it has the Technics logo. No model number or anything on the label But the PCB says "HY 8006" and considering the there are some of these with an 8006 badge that's the best guess I have for a name. Presumably HY stands for "Hengyu" so until I know more about these I guess they're either "Hengyu HY-8006" or "Technics HY-8006" but I'm not sure which one would have made it vs who put their name on it so I'm just saying both for now. I am not able to use google translate on the badge so I do not know what that says but my guess is that it's a computer company that made famiclone stuff.
I got one of these for a few reasons:
1) the layout was painful to behold. Here's the KLE in case you really need that for whatever reason
2) at least some of the caps were doubleshot
3) One version with the same layout had a knockoff Focus 8006 badge and my desire to have Weird Focus clones kicked in
So I received this terrible thing knowing that some of the keys would be doubleshot but expecting that weird keys like the left and right arrows, the long right chevron key, and the R1 symbol keys would be pad print. They aren't though they're doubeshot. It's not high quality and it's not consistent with the other legengs which is especially apparent on the long right chevron which has different line weighting, a different height, and a different width to the chevron as well as the chevron being very slightly raised and having no texture. In my experience really cheap doubleshots will often be raised and untextured as the tooling is too cheap to be textured or to be especially precise in getting the surface of the legend to match the cap. These qualities will often make these caps look like they are pad print in low resolution photos so sometimes a cheap taobao board will surprise you.
Beyond the keys being higher quality than I was expecting the case was about as dirty as I expected but the switches were way worse than I thought they would be and the plate was spotless. This thing came with MX blues but they were so dirty that most of them failed to click and a few were rough enough that they couldn't be identified as tactile. It was the worst I've seen an MX switch get before it stops returning or the spring rusts away or something. Truly remarkable considering the plate was lightly dusty but otherwise perfectly clean. No rust no chow nothing other than a small and subtle dent around the numlock key that I'm pretty sure was a manu error. It's the cleanest plate I've seen from a taobao trash find that wasn't explicitly NOS or NIB.
Now you can see another layer of weirdness that I wasn't expecting, the switch orientation. In the top corner here we have north facing, west facing, and south facing LEDs and on the numpad for the plus and enter keys we have east facing which gives us total cardinal coverage which does absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing, MX mount isn't rotationally symmetrical so an E/W facing switch could crack the stem of a normal cap. So if you happen to have a set of SA caps that fit this layout you're out of luck as this board will break them. That doesn't seem to be a problem with these caps though. I assume that like DSA and XDA the stem on these caps doesn't care about orientation as much as other caps that follow the spec closer would.
This keyboard was proxied for me by a friend and rather than shipping it to me we met a the 2022 Philadelphia keyboard meetup and he handed me a few boards and I handed him a numpad I was trading him. In addition to this I found an unused tealight candle on the sidewalk which I picked up for waxboiling purposes and I won a raffle at the meetup for some milky top gat yellows, some nice PCB mount stabs, and some krytox 205g0.
While I was at it I made a faux nixie just for fun. I don't plan to use this anywhere it's just sitting on my desk looking neat. Still need to put a diode in it though.
So I decided that should take the board, switches, lube, and candle that I got in philly and make a project out of it. The switches we3re desoldered and disassembled. I kept the tops and boiled them to replace the milky tops on the gat yellows and I kept the springs just in case and because it felt wasteful to just toss them out. The sliders were waxboiled which I suppose wasn't strictly necessary since these are new switches but I wanted to see what would happen and I did have this candle just laying around.
Don't use this much wax,it's a bit much and the more you overshoot the mark for wax the longer it will take to break the switches in. I also lubed the switches with the krytox in the way younormally would lobe an MX style switch although I didn't lube the switch pole as that felt like too much work to me and I figured it would be fine enough once the wax was broken in anyway.
And finally I tuned the stabs. These are costar style stabs, IDK if costar made them or if they're clones but I've never seen a sky blue costar stab before. I think they look nice but I still don't like the design. The plate cutouts for the stabs were too large and they rattled around in the plate so I took a few small pieces of painters tape and folded that over the top and bottom edges of the cutouts to eliminate that play and it was very effective. I've heard of some folks lubing the plate cutout itself but I think this is a much more effective solution.
After all of that work getting the switches and stabs up to snuff and lightly cleaning the case and caps to get them good enough I still had to get it working over USB and this part wasn't difficult just tedious. I have no idea what protocol this thing was but after sussing out what VCC and ground were I wasn't able to get it talking to any converter I tried so I don't think it was AT or XT. Assuming the date on the back "9704" is meant to mean April of 1997 then it is unlikely that this thing would be USB so I'm assuming that it is either dead or does not speak AT or XT. So to get it working I desoldered all components and any jumpers that weren't part of the matrix and mapped out the matrix in paint.NET.
There were a few diodes that I left in as they connected the brain to the matrix but the way I configured the firmware meant these diodes were backwards. I could have flipped them physically because but they were under the plate or I could have changed the firmware but I just soldered jumpers between the pads and called it a day. Maybe I'll come back and do it right later but I suspect I won't like this board enough to put in the effort. I had to cut traces and move some keys around to get things moved to more reasonable locations on the matrix which was annoying but for reasons I cannot determine one of the pins on my teensey was always going to ground whenever it was strobed and without that pin I didn't have enough pins to get the full matrix and have lock lights.
Which is a thing I don't know how to set up with soarer's controller, the documentation isn't clear to me and the various configurations I tried didn't seem to work. If anyone has a circuit diagram of how I should set that up I would very much appreciate it. I swapped one LED out for a red LED and another out for a yellow LED and to not have them work is a shame.
And a note on the lock lights, you may notice that this board has them out of order and in fact this is the same order that Focus uses. Clearly this is a case of copying Focus right? Wrong! Focus didn't switch up their lights for no reason, Focus used the same lock light order as the F AT. IMO the Focus layout is designed to make switching from an XT or AT layout to the Enhanced layout easier. It's got the older style lock lights, it has the split right shift like XT, it has the BAE like AT. On Omnikeys (which were presumably made by focus as well) you even get the ability to set the split right shift to an asterisk like it would have on an XT instead of a backslash if you set the dip switches approprately and some omnikeys also let you move the caps lock, alt, and ctry around to be more like an AT keyboard. These aren't design features that Focus invented they just copied them from IBM and I'm not really sure why this stuff gets attributed to Focus so heavily when it's not invention but rather adaptation.
All that aside the board now works over USB (except the lcok lights as mentioned previously and the scroll lock key which I never use and haven't bothered to figure out yet) and I typed this entire post with this bad boy. I've been using it casually for roughly a week and even managed to play some shooters on it (Deep Rock Galactic and Ultrakill) and I did not experience any rollover issues when gaming. The only rollover issue I really experience is that shift+9 blocks shift+0 which makes it impossible to quickly type () as you have to entirely release ( before you can press ) but other than that it has actually been really cromulent especially considering I just jumpered over diodes that presumably would have helped the matrix suck less. I'm actually a little mad at how decent most of this keyboard is because that just makes the shit layout even more noticeable. The switches are nice (maybe a bit light), the sound is nice, the matrix is nice, the caps are nice. A lot about it is nice enough that I've been able to use it for long enough that the layout has really gotten on my nerves. I keep hitting the up key when I end a sentence and then I'll start typing in the line above where I want to, I have to reach all the way up to use a question mark or an apostrophe, I got so sick of the backspace placement I moved it to where the equals key was but that has the side effect of separating minus and equals which makes zooming in and out difficult in some contexts. There's only 6 f keys so fuck you if you need anything above F6. It's genuinely unpleasant to deal with the layout.
If the fucking arrow keys weren't down here messing up the placement of the period and question mark then that would free up space for 3 or 4 keys to be moved to the bottom row as well as moving the question mark out of the top row and you could add more F keys which the keyboard actually needs unlike the arrows which are right fucking there on the numpad already. I generally leave the numlock off with this board because I want to be able to use the nav functions that are only available there and if I'm doing that there's no reason to have dedicated arrows when the numpad is so close. And the backspace situation is clearly fucked. HHKB backspace would be the best solution but you can't easily do that with costar stabs. If this was an alps board w/ a focus style rod stab then I might have been able to mod HHKB backspace into this thing and would be having a much more pleasant time with it. There are later versions of this board that fix some of these issues but create othher issues. If anyone has any info on that version of the board I would love to know as these are cute boards and a black one (hopefully in USB) would be rad as hell and the plum badge is really cool as well.
So all that said should you get this keyboard? No. Unless you swap the switches you're just getting MX blues and the layout is pretty hostile even if you move stuff around. It's a nice looking case and it sounds nice enough but I can't really see anyone using this board beyond the week it takes to form an opinion for a post about it on DT. Maybe if you plan to put your own custom plate and PCB in the chassis it would be worth getting but if you're essentially making your own keyboard you have the skills to do whatever you want and I can't stop you. I'm gonna move some keys around and use this for a bit longer to see if that makes a difference but I suspect it won't be a big enough difference for me to not go back to my ADDS PC+ or some other board where the keys are in the right place.
Here's a typing test if you wanna hear this girl sing: https://freesound.org/people/zrrion_the ... ds/665075/
You can hear in this that the wax isn't broken in yet and I highly doubt I'll use it enough for them to ever actually break in all the way.
