Marquardt butterfly keyboards and cases

[browncow]

Recently i have acquired two olympia ES series typewriter keyboards, one in very nice condition and one in rather bad condition. Since then i have converted the nicer board to stm32 controller, reading up on posts from Purdobol, as he has mapped out the matrix nicely, big thanks if You read this. I have been using the board for a while, even adding a big relay clicker to it for that extra typewriter feeling:

Few things keep me from using this board as a daily driver though. First is the lack of case, second is the layout. I really need a ctrl key in it's usual place, and a working numpad for doing CAD work. Then i realised the keycaps on those boards are all same profile so... I could pretty much arrange any layout i want, with the keys i got from two boards... So here's what it would look like, with a bit of extra macro keys too:

To make this work with the original enter key, i had to reverse-engineer the hinge mechanism. It's rather simple, two bent tabs in the plate, 1.5mm holes for the wire/axle. I measured the spacing, and modified the design a bit to be easier to cut, and also bend without special tools (cutout in the middle of the tab allows to bend them just with a screwdriver)

my test plate and the original rusty one:

https://youtube.com/shorts/_MkETLiw7kI <-sorry for that i have no idea how to force youtube to make this a regular video, not a short.
One caveat is that the enter key is NOT mounted on the switch at all. It just loosely lays on it, and the only thing preventing the user from lifting the key up is that little claw/latch/whatever that is visible from the bottom. So the cutout in the plate for it is neccesary to get right, otherwise it won't work properly...
After figuring this out i could continue with the design, next post i'll show some pictures of the cases i have drawn (sheetmetal) for both original ES100 keyboard, and the big one. Also featuring adjustable feet mechanism, i feel like they are really neccesary with the profile of the caps, the boards have to be at quite big angle to be comfortable to use.

[TNT]

Thanks so much! Amazing work

[browncow]

Thanks so much! Amazing work

No problem! if anybody needs the measurements, or cad drawings of the cutouts for enter key mechanism - i can provide some. In the meantime, here is a case idea i had for the factory keyboard modules. Mostly to test out some ideas before building the fullsize version out of two keyboards.

image.png (352.87 KiB) Viewed 5653 times

[TNT]

Cool! What is the socket in the middle for?

[browncow]

Cool! What is the socket in the middle for?

to plug in the relay you can see in the video