 So, here we are at part 4, I think, of the Building the Keyboard series. What I was going to do between this one and the previous video was I was going to put it in a case. And I got about this far, bolting the keyboard into the top of the old case, when I realized, of course, that rather than build a case for my own, let's just reuse the old one. Because it's already a pretty small typewriter case, it will fit the keyboard just fine. Admittedly all this space back here is wasted, but I don't really mind. Maybe I can think of something to do with it later, and it will end up much more robust than anything I could budget myself. So what I've got as far here is I've bolted it into the case, so we're not going to do that anymore. So let us remove that, and proceed with the rest of the case. In addition, there is some cleaning I need to do to make it actually work properly, so I will get onto that now. So, first thing, remove it from this, which means I need to figure out where I put my screwdriver bits again. So, let's unscrew these. These are just some bolts I found in the workshop I was going to do the case in. I'm not going to do that here, it involves, well I wasn't going to do that here, because it involves more power tools than is really polite for the neighbours. And as I live in Switzerland, they're pretty serious about being polite to the neighbours. They don't want to make noise late at night. It is actually against the law. Okay, okay, now the cleaning. What I want to do is to clean rubber pads on the bottom of the key caps. These press down onto tracks on the board, and they're a little bit gungy and it's not making good contact. So, we once again remove all these screws. With the luck, this should be the last time we have to go through this, so it wasn't quite what I expected. I think I may have, I was hoping to just lift the board off with the screws on it, but that didn't happen. Ah, I've got one. Okay, so here we have, I said, yeah, why isn't that coming off? Is there a screw I've missed? I don't think there's one under there. No, there isn't one under there. It happens every single flipping time. I haven't taken the LCD module off. I need these two screws, because this plugs onto the board. So, until this has come off, the board won't. As I said, this should be the last time we go through this process, assuming it works. If it turns out the keyboard is still gungy, then I'll have to do more cleaning. That probably won't happen on camera, because it'll be really dull. So here we've got the tracks on the PCB, and here are the rubber pads. So that goes off carefully. Now I have not done this before, but I am assured that what you do is you take a perfectly ordinary piece of paper, place the keyboard down, press one of the buttons, and do that. I think that is cleaner. Hmm, this metal bar here is not helping. I need something to place the board on, because I can't get the keys down onto the paper. Be right back. All right, now as everybody knows, solar power makes everything better and can solve all problems. So by placing this solar panel in a box here, I can put the keyboard down like this with the metal lip protruding off the bottom of the case. Yes. Okay, so now I just need to do this for every single key. This may take a while, and in fact, I just need to find some tape and stick the paper down or I will go mad. The tape has been sourced, it's down. Okay, now we should be ready to go. Not anything? A little? See it rubbing? Hmm, this may not be as easy as I thought. I have mentioned I haven't done this before. I can see some faint marks, but I can see a white mark on this key that rubbing didn't actually help with the lock. Hmm, I suppose this is as good as I'll manage. I don't want to take too much off. Eh, that's interesting. I think the little keys produce stronger marks than the big keys, it may be a different formulation of pad. Okay, well that's gone through the keys. So I think I'm just going to call that clean now. So we move the solar panel out of the way and I'm actually going to go over this one more time with the IPA for which I need paper towels. Paper towels are now sourced, a better way to do this because the solder pads are actually tearing up the paper towels. So once this is done, I'm actually going to have to go through it all again and clean the straight bits of paper off. But the point of this exercise is to degrease the pads because I've been handling the board and finger grease on the pads is not going to help humans are disgusting. We exude foul icos all over from every orifice and through all our pores and it's not really very good for electronics. I can actually see an extremely small fly flying around my workbench. Hopefully the IPA fumes will dispose of it for me. It's mostly clean. Finally, I have a tool, I completely forgot I had this anti-santic brush ideal for this job. Alright, so I am now going to call this board clean, but it is going to go side and dry because next we go on to the other part of the job, which is this. This is the bottom of the actual typewriter case with all the typewriter mechanism which I want to get out because I'm going to be putting my stuff in here instead. So, let us dismantle now. So we've got here the print mechanism, which is all the module, so that will just lift out. So let us do that. Unplug it. It's kind of nice to find a way to use it to be honest, but I'm not really sure what I can do with a difficult to drive thermal print mechanism. I can always break it down for the motors and there's endless bits I can take off the board. So we've got these two big step motors, which are probably worth having. That's another plug. The wiring looms of minimal interest, I suppose. That's the keyboard, not the keyboard, the battery connector. I need this ribbon here to come off, some sort of clamp mechanism, or to be honest just a hefty fall. So what have we got here? Two very similar looking step motors, some fairly nasty plastic gearing. The head. I wish there was something I could do with the head. Anyway, this will go aside. Next, I probably want to remove the PCB, so I think I may be able to get away without it. Has it even screwed in? I did actually take this apart in the teardown, so that was like ages ago. Something is holding this down. Just this. Now something is actually fastened to the metal frame. I think it's this. Yeah, it's a grounding thing. So here we've got the main board for the typewriter, interesting screws, some interesting chips, some pieces I could remove, some elderly capacitors I probably shouldn't touch. This bit I've actually been wanting. This is a three amp fuse. There's a piece of rather rare electronics, which I killed, which needs a new fuse. This is too big, but the fuse holder, that, now that I can use. The these PCB connectors are probably worth having. This is a ROM. And sadly, I don't have the equipment to read it, because that would be rather interesting. Yeah, I do want this plastic piece here, so let's get this off. Because this is the blanking plate for the side of the typewriter case. It's not a particularly great blanking plate, but this will fit here and fill some of this void. You see, I wonder, could I just leave the board in? OK, well, here is the PCB for the keyboard. And remember that this will have the actual keyboard on the top of it. And this fits in here. The. These metal brackets fasten to the. The top chassis of the keyboard, so I could actually. Leave the PCB in, it's. Doesn't achieve anything other than filling the gaps on the side. Let's do that. It gives me some interesting. An interesting switch to play with while I'm waiting for stuff to compile, I suppose. You can go in the right place on the right side. OK, this is from the old battery connector. Oh, help, which I now realize. Let the battery pack in. Yeah, I don't want that. This is a. This is the original Nikad battery pack, and it looks pretty chunky. It doesn't have any battery rating on it. I don't want to open it up. I don't. So I can't really tell if it's any good other than testing it electrically, which I don't think I've got the skill to do. OK, so let's put the keyboard back together. So here we have the nice clean chassis. With the key switches in it. And here we have the nice clean PCB that goes on here. And now I have to do all the screws up again. Hopefully the last time, so tedious. Though this isn't so bad. I have a modern Unicomp buckling spring keyboard. It's essentially an old Model M, but made recently. And there's actually something wrong with it. And it's been riveted together. You can't actually do maintenance. So I just have to live with the fault. So this, having lots of screws, it's not actually the worst. More to go. Two more, I believe. One more up to this one. There it is. OK, that's done. So we take our typewriter and you see the keyboard fits very nicely into the mounting point here. So it screws down really firmly because it sits on all various hooks it's supposed to sit on. This will eventually fasten down. And I need to think of a way to do that. I'm probably going to have to drill holes through the plastic base plate and bolt it down. So the top panel fits on here. So this gives me, it's a bit high, I have to say. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure that's comfortable. The whole keyboard is, what, four centimeters this way. So that's not particularly brilliant. You know, if I could find a screen that would fit here, I could turn the whole thing into a laptop. It's got the battery pack and everything. It's not like there's not loads of space. I could fit about five Raspberry Pi's in there. Also, there's all space underneath the PCB. Anyway, I am going to actually live with that because it will do a much better job like this than something I bodged together myself. One potential improvement is I could just saw the whole thing through here and shorten it. I've still got some screws to fasten it together with. But also some plastic clips that have just gone into place. I can't get the thing apart again. OK, I need the screws for fastening this down. I probably stuffed them behind my workbench somewhere. Now we'll hit these, promising. Yeah, that will do fine. So let us reattach the LCD module, which I have now managed to properly reverse engineer. I can draw arbitrary text on it, and I can turn the various indicator lights on and off. Right now, it displays debug information about the firmware because the firmware is not done yet. But it's eventually going to be hooked up to a USB serial terminal so that from the PC I can just write to the serial port and things appear on the screen. I'm really not sure what I can do with it. That's actually useful at a date and time. One idea I have been toying with is as I have an enormous amount of code space in the microcontroller, I could restore the original built-in calculator that this thing had. It used to be a first code space to enter the calculator. And there are actually labels on some of the keys for calculator functions. And it'd be rather cool to have a handy calculator on the keyboard. So you enter calculator mode, do some computations, go out of calculator mode, and it will then type the number that you calculated. I tend to program with a calculator by my side for doing hex stuff. The other thing I've thought of is embedding a whole programming language onto it. Fourth would fit beautifully. Not really sure it'd be useful, though. And you are working with, I think, a 15 character display. Anyway, that's getting a bit aside from things. I need to do something with this. Now, there's plenty of apertures in the case for the cables, but I do need to fasten it down firmly. So the thing I was thinking of doing is drilling some holes in the case and then placing some non-conductive nylon bolts that go through the case, through some washers. And the microcontroller board is then sandwiched onto the nylon bolts. This has the advantage of not needing any holes through the microcontroller board itself, which is rather significantly missing mounting points. So here are the nylon bolts and the washers. So the idea is the bolt sticks through the bottom of the case like this. And in fact, oh no, I keep forgetting that the head will be on the bottom of the case. So I'm going to need to put down a nut all the way to the bottom, which will go here. Then the bolt will stick up, and then I'll put another nut down to hold the board in place. So I need to do this, drill four holes in the case. It is plastic, so it should be too difficult. I need a sacrificial thing to drill into. So what we've got here is a X food grade cutting board. I need to make two connections to the USB, to the controller board. This way connects the actual, connects to the PC, while this one is for programming. And I do need to connect them both up. So I now need a drill bit of the right size. This is about the right size. It's very old and somewhat ancient. The board goes out here. It doesn't need to be precise. I need a hole here, board out of the way. I'm pretty sure I am turning the drill bit the right way around. That's really not going through. Yeah, that's terrible. I think that drill bit has seen rather better days. Actually, just looking at it, I can see it is completely worn. I'm going to throw that away. Let's find another one. What's this? Hey, look, a drill bit. Is that the right size? And it's a bit big. I should have a bit of a clear out of my desk. OK, off searching for drill bits. So I did find one. I actually need to go through and get some more of the medium-sized drill bits. This is a little bit big, but I think that's no bad thing, because it will give a bit of wiggle room. The main thing is it's a HSS drill bit and not a wood drill bit. And so I'm not really sure it will work very well on the plastic. Let's go. Oh, well, that was no trouble whatsoever. That went straight through. So what the bot will do is it will come through here like so. So the next one has to be here. Now, do I want how straight do I need this to be? Well, essentially, not at all. It doesn't have to be straight and the slightest, apart from my self-esteem. I'm not really sure I have a straight edge that will work there. Good way to do this. It's all just too awkward. You know what? I'm just going to wing it. So straight down here. Oh, OK. And we have a second bolt. Actually, I've put a nut on this one, because the board will sit on this nut. And I need a second bolt for this one. OK. So the board sits like this. Now, I need a bolt on the other side. And this is a little bit more difficult, because you can see that there is, in fact, not a lot of space on the other side of the board. See, I was this side here. There's a blank patch of board. I mean, there's like tracks on it. This side's got the button, so I can't put a bolt there, because the nut will hit the button. I can put a bolt here, where there's just pads. I'm not using any of these pads. But I also rather need one down. This end as well. Let's put a bolt here. Marks the, yep. And I should probably have pulled that bit of plastic off, but no matter. It's very elderly sticky tape. And the plastic goes really horrible. So if I had pulled it off, it would just be gungy and disgusting underneath. I mean, you can clean it off. I've got plenty of IPA, but yeah. This is a bodge job. All right, so now, I mean, that hasn't gone in quite where I wanted it to go. And it's a bit tight. Try to loosen it and see if that helps. I might have to file it a bit to move it slightly. Little three bolts do. Could I put one here? I really want one on this side. Push this end into place. Fires in awkward positions. I might be able to, I mean, if I really wanted to, I could move these two wires. This is just ground and VDD, but I actually have some ground and VDD in this side. So I could connect it up there instead. That would free up a gap here, which I could put the bolt in. But I don't, these wires aren't nearly long enough. I'm damned if I'm going to try and soldering this stuff with such a nightmare. I could extend the wires, but I don't want to do that either. I think I am going to, and I think I'm going to risk it. I can always move the wires if I need to. So this wants to go, yeah. Okay, and bolt. Okay, let's see if this works. That has also gone in rather tight, but that's no bad thing. That goes here. This one wants tightening as I loosened it. I think the bolt's turning. Let's need a little bit of adjustment. So this corner is just touching the end of that bolt. Now this puts this one too close to this wire here. So I'm going to have to be careful with that. So our second bolt here goes down. Nope, doesn't work. So this will screw down just finger tight and clamp the board in place. Now this one, there's absolutely no space in here. I think this is actually working. And I'm going to give this one a miss and try this one first. Now this is actually possibly going to touch the VDD wire. So I'm going to have to be careful because I don't want to shear that off the board. That will be irritating soldering till I can get it back into position again. Oh yeah, there is just enough clearance. Okay, that is solid. That's done. Brilliant. Also I've noticed I've done this wrong. So I'm going to have to take these out because these actually, let's not remove them with the drill. Let's use the proper bit because these two screws actually hold the top on. Speaking of the top, let's drop this back into place. And yes, these go in here. And of course now I still have plenty of access through this gap to get at the ports. So I don't need to worry about wires for now. Yeah, that's well and truly stripped. So that's that one actually. Let's just do these two up as well. I can figure out where the other screw went. Here it is. It's actually been quite a while since I started working on this. I mean, I could solve most of my problem by being organized, but what's the fun in that? Okay. Here we go back. Play quite a keyboard. I could fit a screen in there. That's about the right size for a seven inch screen. I mean, it would just fit into this gap. Might need to drum it out a bit. And something on the other side could go in. Don't know what. Probably something storage or USB related. An old thing could run off the power supply of the battery pack, which is what is that? It doesn't have a voltage on it. Where's my volt meter gone? It won't be charged. Minus half a volt. Yeah, it's probably dead actually. But it does standard size battery compartment for D's or C's. Oh, I know what voltage it is because it's a standard size battery compartment for C's. It takes D's rather. Here we go. 1.5 by four, six volts. So that will actually regulate down nicely to the five volts needed for USB. I do not know what the battery capacity is. I could probably run a Raspberry Pi off it. Raspberry Pi is notoriously power hungry. And if I'm also running a screen as well, it won't last long. There's so much space inside. I could probably fit loads more batteries. Load the thing up with lithium polymer. Cool little laptop I suppose. Should be able to see it's running. It's complaining that it's waiting for something for a USB post to configure it. Because that's just a power supply. So I believe that's the hardware done. It doesn't sound bad. It's definitely vintage. I'm less and less convinced about the form factor, to be honest. It's too high to really be comfortable with. My typing style is my hands go on like this and it's just cocked up a bit. Maybe with a decent sized wrist rest that would work, but I'd also have to load the desk a few centimeters. I'll give it a try I suppose. The other thing I'm not sure I can cope with is the layout which is non-standard. I don't need cursor and numpad, but I do need open square bracket and close square bracket except there isn't one. So I'll have to come up with a custom layout for that sort of thing. It will be code in these two I suppose. But I don't know whether I could actually stand using it. Delete's in the wrong place. Not sure what I'd do with these. These become function keys. Well, the next thing is to actually finish the software. It's mostly there. I need to tune some things with measuring key bounce. Coping with key bounce because right now every now and again when you press a key, it registers as two key presses. There is no debouncing logic in place at all. So I'll have to do that. Probably not that difficult. I do believe that that mount has worked very nicely. Given it was crudely bodged together, I might need, yeah, I will need new feet. The four plastic bolts project just a bit further than the old feet do. So they're actually great against the board. But yeah, I, oh, hang on. Now this, this makes it work. There you go. Sweet. Oh, and could I, no, I was just wondering whether I could put the printer mechanisms back in as well. But it actually projects into where the board goes. So I would have to rip it apart. It may be worth doing just for cool value. I mean, I'd take the useful bits off first. You just end up with the platen. Yeah, that's, I think that's worth doing. I think we can probably call this finished for now. Yeah, that's my keyboard project. There should be one more additional video where, what's that screw from? No idea. There should be one more video where I actually demonstrate the thing in action once I've dealt with the software. But I am going to call the bulk of the hardware done for now. I hope you enjoyed watching this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.