It’s food, hair and dead skin in there lol
Discussion
it's got so bad i really really need to fix it
gonna do the lazy fix for now, i have a spare, it will be nice and clean, just need to flash it with the same layout and swap the keys over
i have a full set of relegendable keys now for both, but clearly this one that's been my daily driver for quite a while my guess is that there's some goop got into some of the switches, should be able to just stick em all in a jar of vodka for a week and back to normal
these are cherry silvers, so they don't have much travel before the switch actuates, so i assume that also means it doesn't take as much goop to make them stop or get stuck, which is what is happening now
oof... man, i forgot how long it takes to get set up to build these things
oh well
i need to figure out how i pull these hot-pluggable switch things in and out anyway
i have some tool here and i popped one but it seemed rather difficult
Try compressed air cans and see if that helps
nah i'm pretty sure it's goo that got into the edges of the little plastic things with the cross that you push the key caps onto... i gotta stop eating at my desk...
the spare will be disassembled and the switches all will be soaked in alcohol for a few days and i have been meaning to do some slightly more advanced programming of the keyboard firmware... it's just quite a bit of extra stuff to learn, probably will be a day's work at least
currently, the keyboard has three layouts, the cyrillic depends on me switching manually to russian layout to work and it's clunky, there is a way to make the keyboard emit combination codes - have to be separately programmed for mac, linux and windows - that mean i don't have to change the keyboard layout... and there's some other more fancy bits of programming i have in mind...
anyhow, here is the new one:
still gotta try and figure out why some of the keys are getting sticked... starting to suspect a dodgy USB cable tbh
Yup, needs some alcohol rub and proper clean.
I remember back back in the days there used to be plastic skins/cover for keyboards to keep dust out, maybe you need that 😁
actually, it is dodgy cables... the neat elbow jointed cable... it's obviously pretty low grade, it was not helping either, i tested it independently and it still did it... but the biggest offender was an extension cable, ugreen brand, that was straight up disconnecting sometimes for a while, i'm gonna have to get some better quality cables, but for now i've got adequate cables in place
these cherry keys and key caps are basically mostly invulnerable to all except having actual beer or coffee spilled on them, absurdly robust hardware, really nice stuff, so good you can assemble them yourself
if you haven't got yourself a DIY kit for a mech keyboard - you really should, these things are like adult versions of lego
Thanks will definitely check them out