casual disassembling

 Back again with disassembling! This time nothing really "complex", but a couple of things that held some surprise nonetheless, a couple of ols PS/2 keyboards.

Let's start off with the first, a vanilla keyboard with numpad. As I'm still working abroad without specific tools, everything will be done with that Ikea set and little else.

Lots of screws in the back, but just that! No snaps at all: unscrew and open!

Two kind of screws of different lenght are found throughout the keyboard.

And some screw covers! I had a tiny , trusty old Victorinox helping me taking out those things that would have been very difficult to extract otherwise.

So we open Pandor's Box. So much dust in here!

A bit of cleaning can help!

  

So, here's the first keyboard internal part, the key contacts. Two plastic sheet with conductive paths, separated by a third layer with holes in correspondence of the keys. It's nice, I like the patterns :) and will help me understanding the keyboard matrix.

Under the conductive sheets, there are those tiny silicone caps acting as aprings. a lot of them went into the vacuum as they are very light... can't find any use for them, except as a kind of shock absorber in a package, but I don't have so many. Doh!

  

And the controller! now that's interesting. I hope to be able to convert it into an arcade machine custom controller... all I have to do is to learn how the kay matrix is organized, right? RIGHT?

The contacts look big enough to be hand-soldered to some more practical wires!

The plastic led indicator. Worth keeping as it fits over the leds on the controller, but I can see many other ways to show them.

And, finally, the keys. They are really difficult to pop out as they are fitted in with a double snap, but since it's all the same kind of plastic and there are no springs under the keys (apparently) shouldn't be too much of an issue... but I couldn't find any indication about what kind of polymer this is made of.

Our next subject is a more complex Logitech SZ-49 Internet Pro Keyboard with some broken keys.

We start off with better quality screws, burnished to conceal themselves in the black polymer.

And the extendable stands that came out with just a little pressure on a side.

A couple of metal screws were hidden under the rubber feet...

And here we go! This keyboard had snaps that helped keeping all together, but was more difficult to pry open and I feared that if I pulled with too much strength everything would be blown up around!

The first notable difference is that the silicone caps are kept together in a sheet. It's nice even if it uses a tad more of silicone because you don't risk to lose them around or to suck part of them in the vacuum. It's also "weird" to the touch :P

A second silicone strip is used over the multimedia keys.

The keyboard work exactly the same as the other one, except that this is somewhat better looking.

And has a large ground shield!

This piece of silicone ensured that the controller contacts and the conductive strips stood in contact.

I had to use the force to free the cable from the plastic, the hole allowed just the cable to pass through.

And another controller!

More contact strips!

Differently from the first one, this keyboard has an indication on the material. Both halves are made of ABS, that is a good thing for recycling.

The multimedia keys for volume up/down are kept in by triple snaps...

...and the other keys, like the first keyboard, use double snaps to stay in place.

Finally, multimedia keys and led covers. Those come away without effort as they where held in place by pins and nothing else.

And we're done! So what did we salvage? A lot of screws in first place. I can figure some uses for the silicone parts, but not so many for the conductive sheets. As I've said before, I'll use the controllers experimenting with custom arcade controls. There are a lot of sets available and an arcade controller would make a superb addition to my recently made arcade machine built out of an old Dell computer that would have been thrown away otherwise. The MAME works well with my XBox 360 Wireless controller but I find it impractical for some games like Defender, which is one of my favourites. This could be good material for a DIY post :D