For unknown reasons, Framework does still not ship to our country, although we use the same rules for electrical devices as the EU does. However, this only makes things more complicated. The need for a friend in EU country becomes mandatory, as well as paying two times taxes. In my case more than 25% on USD price listed in the shop. Yeah, crazy. But the enshitification nowadays is just too bad!
This fact does not stop me from helping the community. If you end up with a Framework laptop, you may want to have a keyboard layout not offered by Framework. Luckily they offer blank black keyboards. So I did order mine in black ISO.
After modeling each button of the keyboard exactly as a super vector graphic, I was able to add letters and symbols with other font. Although I messed up with the inverted Linux penguin, the result looks amazing. Be aware, the photos are not as good as the reality. Yes, with the backlight off, the original symbols are brighter and of a nicer white color. Once the light is on, it is less obvious. My camera could not catch the picture as desired. Sorry for that…
What wattage laser & setup did you use? Did you try a series of light-ish passes? Or how did you decide how much power to use?
I believe the keycaps are black, over white, over translucent keys. So I was thinking maybeee if one is careful and slow, removing just the black while leaving the white might be possible. No idea if this is doable with UV (405nm?), or if you’d need CO2 10600nm. If I recall, visible and near visible wavelengths are troublesome for some things.
Yeah, I would love to try more. But to get more blank keyboards is a pain. Old desktop keyboards are not the same.
You observed correctly. Some texts are to close to the edge. Like esc, insert and delete. Also the left ctrl seems to have the LED on the left side, so centered text is not perfect.
I ues a 5W UV laser with 405nm. A co2 RD tube was not able to create such smooth engraving, altough it has smaller spotsize as common co2. It can not match the spotsize 0.03mm of UV Galvo laser. However the galvo has only 150 x 150mm thus you need to work steps.
From memory: Q Pulse 30 Freq. 40kHz and multiple scan angles. 1x 0° 1x 45° 1x 90° all at 250mm/s and 2x -45° at 200mm/s. The exact values I can provide later. For some letters, extra passes had to be done. Maybe because the black color is not perfectly the same at each cap.
The point with white translucent is interesting. I now removed an old cap. It looks like the core is clear plastic with white and then black color on it.
With UV laser you can remove really thin layers with each pass. So only with the third scan (pass) the black color is removed. Although not perfectly, leaving black spots. The next passes removes the color completely. However, during testing I did much more and sometimes slower passes. This resulted in darker letters. Instead of white, or rather clear, the letters started to become kind of brown. Like it was altering the plastics itself. I can provide videos.
Caps Lock: ufff… I don’t know. I could have named it tab or just “the arrows.” Actually, I don’t care.
I just realized to have mixed up screen brightness. F7 is less light thus a - not a + sign. Same for F8. Edit OMG: F5 and F6 are also mixed up. arrrrr
I really hope that changes before my 61Wh battery gives out XD
I personally just got a german keyboard, I don’t really care what’s written on the keys as long as it is ISO (and I did want lables for the special keys)
No, the caps locks key is excellent! The L in that font really works great, in my opinion.
Hmm, do you know Frame Parts: frame-parts.myshopify.com? They say worldwide shipping, and not-for-profit. Note on the front page: “If you need a part that is not on the website, just get in touch and we can order it in for you”. I haven’t needed to use them myself, so I don’t know how they are.
There are more fonts I would be interested to try out…. Like retro ones or the pixel like font called Doto.
No, I did not know that site. Pretty cool, thanks! But still, to pay tax twice is really odd. 20% firsthand is already crazy on it’s own and is an other topic of its own
