Tag: Mechanical Keyboard

The Tinkering of My Mechanical Keyboard

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While tinkering often means dealing with things that are broken, another important element of tinkering is customizing things that work to impeccably fulfill your purpose. In some circumstances, the best way to make an individually customized device is to design it from your specifications from the outset. (The PC I built is an example of this kind of ground-up tinkering.) But there are many ready-made devices that provide great foundations you can modify to meet your personal expectations. Today, I will focus on an off-the-shelf mechanical keyboard that I tinkered with to make more my own.

Keychron K6 after tinkering (Spoiler alert!)

The Foundation:

I started with a keyboard called the Keychron K6, which has a 65% layout (meaning it has roughly 65% of the number of keys that a normal full-size keyboard would have). Notably missing is a keypad, and the function and media keys are hidden behind the number keys, accessed by pressing “fn1” and “fn2” keys respectively.

I chose this keyboard because it was already assembled with a USB-C connector and the option to connect with a wire or with up to 3 devices over bluetooth. It works with both macOS and Windows (which is good, because I do too) with control and command keys and media key support for both OSes. The keyboard was also relatively easy to modify with hot-swappable keyswitches.

I chose to buy this keyboard because it was a good foundation, but there were still some things I wanted to change to make it more useful and enjoyable to use.

The Changes:

The first change that I made was to the keyswitches. The original switches that came with the keyboard were Gateron Brown switches, which have a light tactile bump, meaning before the switch actuates, it gets harder to push. I replaced them with a smooth linear switch with equal (and smaller overall) resistance that I prefer, Gateron Yellows. To do this, I took off every keycap and every keyswitch from the board, then replaced each Brown keyswitch with a Yellow one. Except for one. 

Gateron Yellow switches and a 150g Black switch on the lighting adjustment key

There is one key on the Keychron K6 dedicated only to changing the RGB lighting effects behind each key. Unfortunately that key is right next to the backspace key, which I seem to press often and without great accuracy, accidentally changing my lighting mode while vigorously deleting text. To get back to my preferred lighting style, I had to press the lighting effects button repeatedly to cycle through about 20 different lighting options. So naturally, I took apart a different Black switch I had on hand and replaced the spring inside it with one that takes 150g of force–more than 3x the force for every other switch–to fully press down. That essentially eliminated my frequent mis-clicks on the lighting mode key, allowing me to conveniently edit my documents without disrupting my preferred keyboard lighting scheme. This is exactly the type of small and seemingly insignificant change that gets to the heart of tinkering. 

150g “Super” Black Switch

When all of the keyswitches were replaced, I also replaced the keycaps on all of the alphabet keys, arrow keys and escape keys with “pudding” keycaps. These have a different, more coarse texture that feels better to type with, and give a cool look to the backlight. I kept the original keycaps on some keys, notably the number keys, which also show the function number and media function (play, pause, volume and brightness up and down, etc.). It is useful to have a reminder of what each of the four different inputs the number keys give are. I think that what I ended up with looks nice, even if its appearance isn’t completely cohesive in every way. 

Multi-function Keys!

The last change was a “band-aid mod” which dampened the sound of the stabilizers on the longer keys by putting a band aid below where they come into contact with the PCB. This made the keytapping noise less distracting to both myself and my family… who aren’t always the most thrilled to hear me clacking away at a keyboard.     

Conclusion:

The changes I made may seem trivial, but to me, they elevated the keyboard from a nice tool to something that fits my preferences and needs and eliminated annoyances. This is important for a tool that I use as often as a keyboard. As small as each of the changes are, they add up to make this keyboard something much better for me that it was before. That is the power of tinkering–making something your own.

Making Do: Salvaging

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The things we use break all the time. More times than not, when something is “broken” only one or two component parts are actually broken. Often, the still usable parts can either be salvaged individually or the functional system repurposed in its entirety. Whenever tinkering with something–be it salvaging, repairing, or repurposing–it is important to have a good understanding of the major components within it and how they fit together both functionally and physically. Depending on what you want to do, the intricacies and even the exact way all of the components work are often irrelevant. You only need to have an understanding to the depth that you want to work, and if you don’t plan to take something apart, you can usually get by with only understanding how it fits in with the rest of the system. 

salvaged switches in a bag

Salvaged switches

Salvaging:

My first mechanical keyboard developed a strange problem after a couple years of use. Generally, the keyboard would work, but occasionally, pressing the “enter” or “K” keys would output a random series of characters. 

Key switch (left) and keycaps (right)

Key switch (left) and keycaps (right)

Before I delve deeper, here is a brief explainer of the major components of a mechanical keyboard. First, is the case that holds all of the following parts. Next, the PCB, or printed circuit board, which holds the keyswitches (the part that actually presses down to signal a keystroke), and a microcontroller which registers each time a key is pressed. Keyswitches are either soldered (basically glued together with melted metal that solidifies when it cools) onto a PCB or “hot-swappable” meaning the PCB has special attachments so the switches can be added/removed without soldering. On top of the keyswitch sits the keycap, which is what you physically touch when pressing down a key. 

Based on my keyboard’s strange behavior, I could pinpoint the source of the error. The key switch only registers a binary state (pressed or not pressed) and does not determine the value of the output. Because there was output when the key was pressed, but not the right character, I knew that the switches were functional and that the PCB must be faulty. The keyboard as a whole was useless to me, but not every part in it was broken. With very limited options to repurpose or repair it, it was time to salvage.

First, I lifted off all the keycaps, which are both easy to remove and compatible with any other keyboard.

Salvaging the keyswitches was quite a bit more involved. The main benefit of a hot-swappable keyboard is that, well, swapping in and out is easy and solder-free. Unfortunately, my keyboard had soldered switches, so to salvage them I had to get out my soldering iron.

 Soldering iron (bottom), solder sucker (right), and PCB (background)

I had a very small amount of experience with soldering before this, but I had never desoldered before. The process of desoldering requires only two tools: a soldering iron and a solder sucker. First, hold the hot soldering iron against the soldered area until it begins to melt, then press the solder sucker against it, and release the plunger to suck up the liquid solder. From there, used wire snippers to trim off the LEDs and a pair of pliers to pull the out. Then, I just had to pull the switches off of the plate, and I had a pile of salvaged switches ready for use on a different keyboard. 

 Top of PCB showing switches and tools

The switches I salvaged are linear Red switches from the well regarded German company Cherry. They normally cost $3.50 for a pack of 10, meaning by salvaging the switches from this 110-key keyboard, I salvaged nearly $40 of fully functional parts ready for use in another project.