I bought some new keyboards
I go to Melbourne a couple times a year, for work. It’s where our HQ is, and it’s good to have time in person with my colleagues. It used to be that most of this time was spent at big tables or in front of whiteboards. There’s still quite a lot of that, but the past two or three times I was in Australia, I spent a much larger chunk of time at a desk, programming. Surely not the majority of my time, but enough time that I cared about the ergonomics. So, last time I was there, I dug through the spare hardware cupboard and put together the best workstation I could. It was… not great. Fortunately for me (in one sense, anyway), one of my colleagues was on leave. I boldly appropriated his desk, which was much better hardware than my scavenging had gotten me. The thing that I ended up grumbling about, though, was the mouse and keyboard.
Let’s be clear: This was all on me! I don’t need the Australian office to stock all my favorite hardware for the 7% of the year I spend there. On the other hand, I did feel like I wanted to plan ahead for next time. I keep a bag of stuff in the Melbourne office to make the trip easier. This is mostly cables, adapters, and toiletries. It’s much nicer to have my favorite Merkur safety razor waiting for me than to spend two weeks using disposables. My plan was to put a keyboard and mouse in that bag. Maybe a little USB hub. Simple, right? Well…
I’m fussy about my keyboards. I’m not a keyboard wonk, I think. I know just a little bit about mechanical keyboards, and I know what I like. Mostly, what I like is full size (with numeric keypad) keyboards, in the traditional layout, with clicky switches. When I started thinking about taking a keyboard to Australia, I owned three mechanical keyboards. All Ducky brand, all with Cherry MX blue switches. Surely, I could just go order one of these, right? Well, it didn’t seem like it. They were backordered everywhere I looked. The most likely-seeming one was the Ducky One 3, which looked about right. I almost just ordered it, but then I remembered: a lot of keyboards are now configurable via software. That sounded interesting, so I did some more digging.
The short version is that there’s an open-source firmware for keyboards called QMK, and lots of keyboards use it. It lets you remap keys, program macros, and do that sort of thing. A coworker asked, “Why is that better than just updating your settings in macOS?” The answer is, basically: If you tell your keyboard that its caps lock key should act like a control key, it will do that on every computer you attach it to, with no configuration required. The longer form answer is that you can do all sorts of weird stuff that macOS would never allow.
Ducky doesn’t support QMK (or other reprogramming) on most of their keyboards. The one I did find with QMK is the “Ducky One X ‘Inductive Keyboard’”. They bill it as “the world’s first inductive keyboard”. I don’t really understand what an inductive switch is. I looked into it a little. I do know that it’s not a clicky blue switch, though, and I know that it costs a lot more than my usual keyboards. Pass.
Now I was sort of in open territory where I didn’t want to be: picking a new kind of keyboard. This was agony. I was trying to remember what other models I’d used. I looked into one in the US office (where most of the keyboards are mechanical, with brown switches), and was reminded how much I dislike clamped-in stabilizer bars. (More on that later, maybe.) Figuring out just what I wanted seemed like it was going to be a pain. Also, the news kept telling me about massive impending tariffs, which were surely going to punish me for delaying on ordering hardware from abroad.
Keyboard 1
Eventually, I found myself looking at Keychron. I knew of them only because a few years ago I bought a four-pack of Keychron C1 mechanical keyboards for the office for $50. In my mind, they were some sort of Johnny-come-lately cheap-o brand. On the other hand, their site had an enormous variety of keyboards, and I couldn’t find anything online that backed my view. I decided to order a K10 Max QMK, which ticked a couple key boxes: it’s programmable with QMK and it’s wired (but also works over Bluetooth or with its own transceiver)
The problem was that it didn’t have a blue switch option. Red, Brown, or (I’m not kidding) Super Banana. Reds and browns, I knew, were no good for me. Super banana, I was not sure, but I didn’t want to commit to something I might not like. The good news is that the K10 is hot-swappable. That means that after you pull the keycap off of the switch, you can pull the switch out, too, and replace it. I gather that some gamers put different switches in for different keys. I don’t really know why, but it’s something like “I want a really low activation force for my movement keys but a really quick reset for my trigger keys”. I didn’t care enough to look into it. My goal was to put in one hundred blue switches and dump all the originals into a box.
I ordered the K10 along with a tube of 110 Cherry MX blue switches. When it arrived, I played around for a bit, but quickly got to work pulling off all the keycaps and pulling out all the switches. This was easy, although the switch-pulling tool that came with the keyboard was a bit rough on my fingers. With all the (red) switches pulled, it was time to put in the blues. Inserting is not as simple as pulling, sadly. At the bottom of each switch are two stiff wires that slide into receivers in the keyboard. The upper part of the switch has two little arms that snap into place when the switch is seated. If the wires aren’t perfectly lined up, or aren’t straight, they will buckle or bend, and then the switch won’t form a circuit with the PCB.
This means that for each switch you insert, you first need to look carefuly at the leads to make sure that they’re straight and whole. It’s a little slow-down, but not so bad.
I put on some music and got to work. Pretty soon, I’d replaced all the switches and put the keycaps back on. I opened the Keychron Launcher to begin phase two. The Keychron Launcher is a web interface for managing the keyboard’s settings. It amazes me, because it uses a web API called WebHID, which gives your browser access to your HID devices per se. I had to use Chrome, but when I did, let let me flash my keyboard’s firmware and update its keymap. It also had a key tester that let me test every single key. When one or two didn’t work, I pulled the switches and replaced them with spares. Pretty soon, the whole keyboard worked and had a mapping I liked. I was delighted. Sure, it was expensive, but it has a great weight, it has the switches I like, and I could keep tweaking the keyboard layout until I was perfectly happy.
Keyboard 2
It was good enough that I went right ahead and ordered another one, that one for my office. In the week since my first order, the price had gone up $20 — almost certainly tariff-related. This was just the first problem.
I ordered that second keyboard on April 6th, and I had it in my hands on the 10th. I stuck around a little late after work to swap out the switches. Pretty soon I had a keyboard that worked great… except for eleven keys, as seen here.
Many of the keys worked if I replaced my aftermarket blue switches with the original reds that were included, so my first theory was that I had quite a lot of busted blue switches. I know the failure rate on switches is high, so I went with that theory and ordered more. Unfortunately, when they arrived, it didn’t help. The reds still worked and the blues didn’t. Except, sometimes the reds didn’t. Mostly it was centered around one part of the board, and if I pressed hard, they would start or stop working. I called on my friend Jesse, established member of the keyboard-industrial complex. He worked with me for a while, prompting me to do stuff I never would’ve done, like close circuits with a wire lead. Eventually, he was having me send close-up photos of the printed circuit board that all the keys slot into. He said, “Oh, look at those sockets! They’re at a bit too much of an angle, you’re not going to get good connections with those at all, they need re-soldering correctly.”
Here’s a photo from around that time. Is it a bad socket? I’m not sure, I had a hard time seeing it, but Jesse seemed convinced, and I believe him. But this might be an unrelated photo. My point is, this is what I was stuck thinking about!
Friends, I did not spent $190 on a pre-assembled keyboard just to be stripping
things down to the PCB and re-soldering them! I’m not that kind of computer
nerd! Frustrated, I wrote in to Keychron, who said they’d send me another PCB.
Not as good as another keyboard, but I could do this. Eventually, the package
came. I carefully disassembled my keyboard: I removed the keycaps, then the
switches, then the top case, then the plate, then then PCB. I attached the new
PCB, put on the top case, and put in the switches. I was not bold enough to
put on all the keycaps, though. I fired up the Keychron Launcher and entered
key test mode. Almost perfect. Everything worked except for one key that
I’d hardly need: t.
Probably I could key in a whole paragraph, using only such glyphs as remained available. I mean, I had a double dozen symbols under my fingers, plus one! Only one member of our language’s ABCs was missing. Sadly, my keyboard was here for work, and my job is hardly one focused on producing source code lipogram. If I was gonna use my new device, I would need all 101 keys working.
I took the keyboard apart again to see how things looked. They didn’t look good.
Look at this a little while and you’ll see one of those black shapes isn’t in line with the others. It’s not just bent, it’s totally disconnected. It had fallen off the PCB and was sitting under it inside the keyboard. That’s the socket, and it’s how the keyswitch connects to the circuit so that, when pressed, the switch closes the circuit. If the socket falls off, the key absolutely will not work.
“What do I do now?” I asked Jesse.
“You solder it,” he said. “Good luck.”
Fortunately, I had a soldering iron, never used. I got in the 2023 Bag of Crap from Jesse’s company. He reported its original price as $2.60. After trying to use it, I’m sorry to say that it was closer to $0 in value. Mine did not heat up at all when plugged in. It probably could’ve been used as an awl, but what I needed was a very hot metal point, and I didn’t want to heat it up on coals. I moaned and wailed in the office, and my coworker Kurt said he’d bring in a proper soldering iron for me to use. I was still pretty frustrated at being in this position, but if it was going to get my keyboard working, fine.
He brought in a soldering iron and magnifiers, and I got to work. Five or six times, on three or four distinct days, I tried to solder that socket back on. I couldn’t get it done. On one hand, it’d been decades since I last soldered anything. On the other hand, I felt sort of incompetent.
I emailed Keychron again: Look, I said, the new PCB is at least as bad off as the old one. I tried hard to not ask you for more, because I’m sure the tariffs are a problem, but at this point I think I’ve done enough. Can you just ship me a new complete keyboard so I am not forced to perform work on yet another replacement part?
“No problem,” they said. “We’ll send you a new printed circuit board.”
Steam came from my ears, and Kurt pitied me. “Let’s fix that,” he said.
Kurt sat down and methodically performed about a dozen steps, including the three that I’d performed, plus another nine that probably made any part of the job actually work. With the piece soldered on, I reassembled they keyboard and 99% of the switches worked. I took a deep breath, pressed down on the remainder, and then they all worked. I screwed everything together and put on the keycaps. Everything was going great…
…until the very, very last keycap. Remember at the very beginning, I said I like to get a keyboard with a ten-key numeric keypad? I really do, and I use it! The last key I was putting on was the keypad’s “Enter” key, at the far bottom right. They keycap went on, but it didn’t bounce up when pressed. It stayed down. They Keychron keyboard had the screwed-in stabilizers like I like, but the stabilizers on this key were now partly stuck in place. They’d move if pushed or pulled, but it took more force than the spring in the keyswitch. Here’s a demonstration:
I asked Jesse, but he didn’t have any advice that avoided disassembling the dang thing again. I really, really wanted to avoid that. I’d had this thing for two months, and I just wanted to have it in place and working. I searched the internet, I wiggled at the crossbar of the stabilizer, but nothing helped.
Here’s the thing about stabilizers: the wider or longer the key, the more important the stabilizer is, and the closer to the edge you his the key, the more important the stabilizer is. The keypad’s enter key is pretty short, at 2u, and I’d mostly hit it toward the middle, anyway. I didn’t need a stabilizer! Taking the stabilizer out would be a keyboard-disassembling task. On the other hand, I could mangle the keycap so that it wouldn’t snap onto the stabilizer, and would only connect to the switch. I got a spare keypad enter key, I got a pair of pliers, and I fixed that keyboard.
Now I have working, clicky, programmable, lovely keyboards on my desks at work and at home. I’m pleased with them. On the other hand, this was a stupid amount of work, given the cost of the things. I think I’d be happy to buy another Keychron, and certainly I’d like my next keyboard (if I ever have to buy another) to be programmable with something like QMX. On the other hand, I only wanted hot-swappable keys for the sake of getting blues. I think my next keyboard will have to come preassembled with blue switches, preferably soldered right on by somebody else.
After this was all over, I took Kurt out for some beers as thanks, which came with the bonus of getting me the pleasure of his company for a couple hours. Next time, I’ll also do that without all the soldering.