1 week Ago By Tom Nardi
Hackaday readers are likely the kind of folks that have a favorite keyboard, so you can probably imagine how devastating it would be to find out that the board you’ve sworn by for years is going out of production. Even worse, the board has some internal gremlins that show up after a few years of use, so functional ones in the second-hand market are becoming increasingly rare. So what do you do? This is the position [TechBeret] recently found himself in with his beloved Sculpt keyboard.
When Microsoft decided to step back from the peripheral market last year, he started looking at alternatives. Finding none of them appealing, he decided instead to . Every aspect of the resurrection is covered in a phenomenally detailed write-up on his blog, making this a valuable case study in modernizing peripherals with the popular microcontroller.
According to [TechBeret], the biggest problem with the Sculpt was its wonky wireless hardware. It was bad enough that the board was permanently paired to its USB dongle, but apparently, the RF side of things would degrade over time, leading to an ever shorter range. So he decided the best course of action was to simply give the board a brain transplant.
Since he didn’t really want it to be wireless anyway, he figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to create a replacement PCB that reads the keyboard matrix and speaks USB Human Interface Device (HID). In fact, he was able to find a couple of projects that did that exactly. Instead of copying them, he took them as inspiration to help direct his own effort.
His primary goal was to develop a drop-in replacement for the original PCB — specifically, he didn’t want to have to take a Dremel to his keyboard just to get it working again. He also wanted to use components he knew would be available for the foreseeable future, as well as bring USB-C support to the party. Finally, he didn’t want to get bogged down in writing code, so the replacement board had to be able to run the popular QMK firmware.
By his own admission, [TechBeret] is no expert in such matters. But that makes the write-up all the more compelling. Rather than seeing a perfect result on the first attempt, we get to learn along through his trials and tribulations.
Even if you’ve done this kind of thing before, we bet you’ll pick up some interesting tricks along the way. We particularly liked his tip about test-fitting your PCB by . It might seem like a lot of work to save a keyboard, but then, those who’ve come to love it — — will tell you the Sculpt isn’t just keyboard.
might even make it better..
