deskthority

Key Chatter is just a bad connection inside the switch. The simplest solution is to replace the switch. Cleaning it up may help too but I have never tried that.

I use Gateron Browns and Blues for about 10 years now. Two keyboards (my custom K84CS). One with Blue switches the other one with Browns ...

There will one PCB trace (or wire if it is handwired) that connects all the bottom row switches which do not work. That trace does not have correct connection to an MCU pin or there is not a good contact to a pull-up or pull-down on that trace.

Plus, getting the model off the build plate resulted in cracks more than once, so supports are kinda cushioning the model. I mean, I can build supports directly in freecad and save some hassle at printing time, but not sure if this saves effort or increases :)

Yes, it is probable that the part ...

I looked at Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. I would not go for it. I have seen some bad review of the auto-leveling system. IIRC by FauxHammer. Yes, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y-rDu23t-M&t=300

The claim was along the lines of "it is auto-zeroing (a fake auto-leveling where springs ...

I can confirm that oily environment is bad for rubber domes on TV remotes at least. If it gets there then not only it degrades the contact conductivity but may also soak into the conductive rubber and damage its conductive properties.
This should not be such a big problem for PC rubber dome ...

I sometimes compensate for elephant foots by chamfering the bottom. Sometimes elephant foots do not matter for functionality. In such a case, I do not care.

And elephant foot is often better than uneven surface because of the surface being too close to horizontal and resting on support.

Tiny steps ...

It looks to me that you can modify the flipper model so that it is printable in vertical position without support. Align the two side-tabs and the spring holder to one plane which will be touching the build plate when printing. Print vertically. This way you can also print much more tabs at once ...

It is probably switches with some kind of defect which go wrong. E.g. one of the letters which failed for me was C. It is used less than the average. I think E and T were OK too. I'm sure space bar was OK.

What printer do you have? I have Elegoo Mars4 DLP and I did not notice size differences depending on the position on the plate. There may be some. I did not try to investigate this. I went with DLP because it was claimed to be more resilient to stupid users who do not know how to dial up their ...

Well, if helps you then here is another data point.
Kinesis Advantage, Cherry MX Brown, produced & bought in 2002 in USA. I do not know where the switches were produced. Two switches turned bad in around 2014. Estimated number of presses on them was about 6 million.

I do not have more experience ...

I have some Gateron switches a keyboard of mine. I needed to replace 3 switches on it. The approximate number of presses on each replaced switch was around 3 mil. The other switches on the keyboard are still ok.

@davkol
I'm impressed

Well, if it is a Texan company then it is likely targeted to USA which has almost 2 times higher GDP per capita than Germany. People have more money, keyboards can be even more expensive and still sell.

All types of hot-swap sockets I've seen have been surface-mounted, and I think the process of soldering them can be completely automated on standard equipment.

Well, the switches still need to be inserted to the sockets. But yes, in general, surface mount is cheaper.

But I'm responding because ...

I don't understand why soldered keyboards cost more than ones with hot swap sockets.

You cannot compare products targeted to Germany with products targeted to China (which possibly may also be sold to G7 countries). There is very likely a difference in the level of support / warranty. But one ...

Expensive and not ergonomic.

There is an advantage to soldered switches. The connection between a switch and its receptacle will not fail.

Maybe you can find some indicators to detect formaldehyde to check the hypothesis. E.g. chromotropic acid method, spectrophotometric methods. Hospitals use some formaldehyde detectors to check their sterilization equipment (this is not likely to detect very low concentrations though). Anyway, the ...

I kind of assumed you want to de-smell only the switches.

Big vacuum chambers can be bought. They are pricey though.

Maybe you can make one from a thick walled sewerage pipe. Run your design through some FEM package to check it will not implode. Test safely before actually using.

It is a good ...

Vacuum chamber should help. You can try a higher temperature as well. It should be safe up to around 65 °C.

I liked gaming on Kinesis Advantage. Lots of keys near home position. Some keys on thumb cluster. I defined keys in the game (so that I do not need function keys themselves). Keys can be remapped in the keyboard itself as well but Kinesis Advantage does not support configurations ... therefore not ...

I use my branch of chrisandreae's firmware: https://github.com/hercek/keyboard-firmware

At the time I was deciding, it was the only one with the proper on-the-fly macro and remap features. A possibility to define macros/programs in a GUI application (likely something like Vial for QMK now) was only ...

Use a different firmware or get a patch for QMK which will use a standard keyboard descriptor. You may lose some features (e.g. the Vial GUI will likely not work when the keyboard uses the standard descriptor). But the pathch can be done in such a way that you could activate full QMK functionality ...

... or maybe USB Ninja uses QMK (like) descriptor when triggered as a keyboard.

USB Ninja is transparent only when inactive (not triggered).

Here is the device descriptor for my keyboard:


Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1d50:6028 OpenMoko, Inc. Teensy 2.0 Development Board [ErgoDox Keyboard]
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 1.10
bDeviceClass 0 [unknown]
bDeviceSubClass 0 [unknown]
bDeviceProtocol 0 ...

I just wonder what set it off NOW. I've been using this keyboard for years. And it worked fine for a few hours and then something happened that triggered the alert.

Based on your 1st post you updated controller and firmware on your keyboard recently. PC scans USB bus for the connected devices ...

Get a patch for your firmware so that the keyboard is behaving as a standard USB (boot) keyboard when connected to a PC. If you need extensions to the standard protocol then make them optional and activate them only when not connected to company PC. You may need to cheat on VendorId and ProductId as ...

Well, I do not know. It looks just line another standard keyboard without a numpad.

It is not ergonomic. No programmability. Unnecessary big space bar but missing application key and right windows and alt key. F-keys in a layer but layer-shift key not easily reachable. One of the hundreds of the ...

I'll start worrying when (not if; when...) chat-GPT becomes aware that it's shameful to be identified as such, and dumbs itself down to the level of the average, illiterate human bean.

Problem with LLMs (i.e. also ChatGPT) is that they lie in about 20% of the cases. They do it with a great ...

I found out that ordering keycaps on aliexpress works very well for good prices, No custom hassle when delivered to EU. But you may not be able to get the fancy stuff. No fancy Signature Plastics caps.

@moon: Any functionality which requires a custom keyboard driver on your PC would not work when you connect it through a separate controller.