Heyo! I’ve been ill for quite some time now, so, had to wind my shop down while I recover; also, the controllers have been out of stock for a bit over a month now. As such, I’m still in the process of ordering a new batch of these controllers, tho at the moment, the order a few days’ time away. Also, I am working on an adapter that fits my controller and works with the raw keyboard, FPC and all - hope to show the first design to yall soon! ^~^
Quite a few people bought controllers from the first batch; would be good for someone to describe their experiences here!
Do you think it would be possible to route the cable further and away from underneath of the keyboard?
For instance it could be some kind of lengthened cable.
What I want to do is to take fw13 keyboard and put it into a chassis of a different laptop. And as the connection cable of fw13 keyboard is really short I don’t really yet know how I’ll fit that into the chassis if the board will have USB-C connector underneath. If your board would be solid then it would have to lie under the keyboard when I’ll connect it and for me it doesn’t work
It could be two boards:
connector to keyboard board – then cable between boards – then something that actually converts it to USB.
Would it be possible to have any forecast/idea about when we’d be able to expect to buy the first keyboard-only controller?
Today I received a top cover of fw13 and I’d like to do something with it. I could order the input controller that you have but if you’ll make the keyboard-only controller very soon then I could go with that one or with both.
Likewise, I was planning on doing something similar, and I’ve already made measurements on the keyboard to try and 3d-print a keyboard case. I haven’t posted anything yet since I still have to perfect the measurements, but I’d be happy to collab with anyone who is interested in the project.
I didn’t do measurements and I don’t know yet what I’m doing but I’ll want to put that keyboard into a chassis of an existing laptop.
I’ll also need to do 3d-printing or something similar (maybe I’ll simply use wood) but first I’ll have to find out how much space I’ll need and I’ll also need to take the laptop apart.
Visually comparing my keyboard to the in-built one it takes less space in every regard so maybe it could even fit with the touchpad (but I doubt it).
So the preference for me would be that the USB port wouldn’t be soldered to the chip and it would take as little height as possible.
It’s a little different use case than an external keyboard that someone would put onto a table
Is this your goal even? You said external but for what purpose?
Yes, what I meant with external keyboard is a keyboard I could plug into any of my other computers. Not to integrate it into some other computer (or table), but to have it work standalone.
Right now I’m at the stage of building a 3D render of the keyboard layout, but I haven’t been able to work on it too much since I’ve begun my exams season. I have a physical keyboard replacement with which I have made some initial measurements and loaded them on a Fusion360 project. My next step would be to refine those measurements so they actually fit the keyboard.
This means that the extender board won’t be compatible with direct chip because of the notch not being there. So I’ll need to put a paper there or something to compensate the the notch.
The connection to the extender would be ok but the connection to the chip from the extender wouldn’t.
It would fit. It wouldn’t be just plug & go. You would have to be careful that visually it looks aligned straight, and it would be best to buzz the pins with a multimeter (use continuity function) to check that the pins are aligned.
But because the width at the narrow part of the notch is nearly the same as the width of a non-notched cable the cable should be held in the correct position, in the left-to-right direction (the notch is 13.45mm +/- 0.05, a non-notched cable is 13.50mm). Straight-ness would be up to you.
It is not ideal. But the connector that fits the notches exactly is only made by one company. It might be hard to get boards assembled with that connector. I checked JLCPCB (a board fab & assembly company that a lot of people use) and they don’t have the part. One could assemble it themselves, digikey has the part, but not everyone wants to do that or is set up for it.
What I’d really like to be able to do is use the FPR module as a power button without the keyboard. I foolishly ordered one, which just arrived, and I realized that it’s wired through the keyboard. My Thinkpad mod won’t be able to use it unless I get creative (or someone else does, which, thankfully, appears to be the case here).
What if we were to just use the bottom cover kit in addition to the input cover kit? Would that make this project really easy (albeit expensive and a bit bulky), since we no longer would need to 3D print the keyboard case?
@MJ1 I’m unsure. The FP reader might work, but I really only care about being able to power it on. If I can secure some time in the next week to play with wiring, I will find out.
To update my last post, I’ve made some progress in building a 3D model of the keyboard. Here’s the STL file I’ve come up with Body Keyboard 3.stl (76.8 KB). I’ve been using Fusion360 to model the keyboard parametrically so everything fits, but perhaps there are still some adjustments to be made to the measurements. These measurements have been taken manually and tweaked manually to make the previous model cover the keys of the keyboard. It still hasn’t been tested over the whole keyboard, but I share them in case they’re a useful starting point for anyone. Please do send my way any corrections anyone makes!
My next step would be to create a case for the whole keyboard, after which I would only need @Arya’s adapter for my first prototype!
It still hasn’t been put together, and it’s not the most ergonomic, but I hope to iterate over it to improve a possible final product.
As you can see in the picture, I had to print the case in two parts since the build was too large to fit in my printer. I don’t know what mechanism would be best to hold the case and keyboard together (I’m pretty new to this). I have a sheet of wood I was thinking of using for the prototype’s backplate, but was still wondering how to fix the backplate to the case. For now, I have made some holes to fix both of them with screws, but I’d prefer it if the final product was a bit more polished.
I bought it. The keyboard works, but touch pad is a no go. If you can’t get the keyboard to work trip the BT and GD and plug it in. It will pop up with a drive. Open said drive and download the zip file from the sellers store page and then drop the .uf2 file into the drive. The drive should disappear for a sec then reappear. Then the key board should work.
As far as getting the touch pad to work… I am stuck there, I’ve tried reaching out to Arya/Crimeir, but haven’t received a response back. So the issue going forwards with qmk will be adding/reverse engineering the driver for the pixart trackpad[1][2] that is something that is outside my skill set.
I just built one too! The USB-C cable needed some scary-looking twisting to get it out of the corner of the “laptop”. Other than that, it was relatively easy to assemble. Nothing but the input cover kit, the bottom cover kit, @Arya’s wonderful controller, and a USB-C cable were needed.
As for software, I did some things to @Arya’s QMK fork:
Merged with upstream. This eliminated a weird bug where holding S, T and R emitted an extra F6 keypress, and I think this fixed the Fn+Space backlight toggle too.
Deleted some apparently broken FnLock state storing code.
Got the Caps Lock LED to work! (I can also control the power button LEDs if I find a use for them.)
My version is here.
Note: it currently swaps Ctrl and Fn. You can edit keyboards/framework_rp2040_controller/keymaps/default/keymap.c to swap them back if you like. In the same file there’s also a line to uncomment if you want FnLock enabled by default.
I’m unlikely to have time to look into the touchpad situation any time soon though
