Paint it black
I opened this professional Speccy keyboard and to my amazement there was no classic ZX PCB "in the basement". Just this -
An original Speccy with Mic, Ear and TV simply plugged into it and rerouted to the outside of the keyboard frame. The keyboard logic itself was connected to the edge bus.
You gotta love the eighties. It's a mechanical keyboard with individual switches, no membrane. Now I would like to renew its heavily abused keys. One very expensive option is to buy completely new set of switches, sold them to the keyboard and use keys from existing PC keyboard. But this seems too expensive. I thought I would paint keys (buttons) to black using Krylon Fusion color as advised on the internet. But -
Is there a neat way to print labels on top of keys at home?
p.s. One funny thing about this keyboard is that it has two RESET buttons. One in the bottom left and one in the top right corner. So you do your work and you press the wrong key and it goes to Vallhala. What did I say about the eighties. I'll probably rewire these two so that they do some smart multikey operation. The one at the bottom left is a good candidate for Caps Lock and the one at the top right is ideal for Delete - I just have to resold it to Caps + 0.
p.p.s. I know you can connect PS2 keyboard to Speccy easily and I know its the cheapest and the smartest way to do it - but I want to fix this one. After all how can anyone spending perfectly good time toying around with 30 year old useless machine at home appeal to my practicality and realism?
An original Speccy with Mic, Ear and TV simply plugged into it and rerouted to the outside of the keyboard frame. The keyboard logic itself was connected to the edge bus.
You gotta love the eighties. It's a mechanical keyboard with individual switches, no membrane. Now I would like to renew its heavily abused keys. One very expensive option is to buy completely new set of switches, sold them to the keyboard and use keys from existing PC keyboard. But this seems too expensive. I thought I would paint keys (buttons) to black using Krylon Fusion color as advised on the internet. But -
Is there a neat way to print labels on top of keys at home?
p.s. One funny thing about this keyboard is that it has two RESET buttons. One in the bottom left and one in the top right corner. So you do your work and you press the wrong key and it goes to Vallhala. What did I say about the eighties. I'll probably rewire these two so that they do some smart multikey operation. The one at the bottom left is a good candidate for Caps Lock and the one at the top right is ideal for Delete - I just have to resold it to Caps + 0.
p.p.s. I know you can connect PS2 keyboard to Speccy easily and I know its the cheapest and the smartest way to do it - but I want to fix this one. After all how can anyone spending perfectly good time toying around with 30 year old useless machine at home appeal to my practicality and realism?
Post edited by tstih on
Comments
It's the StoneChip Keyboard casing. Here's how it looks closed
and here are variants.