i am mostly happy with my fw16 but within th last day th _ ky on my kyboard stoppd bing rliabl. at first i was abl to gt it mor rsponsiv with a littl bit of comprssd air, but that was only a tmporary solution. givn comprssd air hlpd, it is vry clarly an issu of matrial stuck within th mchanism, but thr dosn’t sm to b a way to accss th mchanism for propr claning.
plas advis on nxt stps
(no rally that was natural txt, it happnd to fail on vry word in that block)
givn th inconsistnt bhavior it’s clarly forign matrial, but th framwork 16 kyboard appars to b th last rpairabl componnt in th machin. givn th tndncy for kybards to nd claning, this is xtrmly unfortunat.
it goes in and out. right now it’s mostly working (very occasional drops or doubles), but i’ve ‘fixed’ it a few times today with careful application of spudger and compressed air, and so far it has eventually returned to being problematic after each one.
that (and the responsiveness to canned air, as i mentioned in the message to support) is why i’m reasonably confident there’s something in there that isn’t meant to be in there. cleaning the keyboard is difficult when you can’t expose the mechanism, though.
i’ve made a couple of (very careful) attempts to see if i can pop the keycap loose of the scissor mechanism; i’ve done this procedure on scissor switch keyboards many times over the decades, and the way the fw16 mechanism responds to force makes me VERY nervous about applying more.
overall, it’s not super dire just something i’d rather get lastingly addressed. for a brief span of time earlier i put the e in my clipboard and pasted it while typing. tedious, but i’m not currently working on a software project or doing a lot of writing aside from idle chatter on discord.
Since this is on a FWL16, you could remap another key to “e”. Far from ideal. But it could get you by until a fix or replacement, if you don’t need to type that much.
I don’t recall hearing that anyone has tried removing the FWL16 keycaps.
yah, rbinding is somthing i was thinking about doing. thr are keys i don’t need on thee numpad but it’s all th way over thr. mayb i’ll mak a layer for alt gr to act as the ky i ned.
the way it cycles in and out is honestly a mixture of hilarious and infuriating. i don’t have the energy to spend a lot of time editing atm, though. so we get what we get.
the most annoying thing? i’m an esdf player, and the first symptom something was wrong was me not being able to move forward in minecraft.
anyway, i didn’t expect miracles posting this thread, just wanted to be sure i hadn’t missed anything that might help. thanks for chiming in
i realized that my keyboard had been working for a while. wondered: what’s different?
answer: i haven’t tried to play minecraft for a while.
this warranted testing. sure enough, keyboard is perfectly well behaved while cool. after i let it get warm enough i could feel it through the keyboard, the e key started being erratic.
shut minecraft down, and it’s taking a lot longer for it to stabilize than it took to act up, but that’s consistent with the thermal conditions (i.e. the keyboard stays warm for a while). it is steadily improving, though
so now i have to wonder if the compressed air had any effect from blowing at all, or if it was simply providing coolant.
It being only the “e” key, is puzzling. Certainly temperature effects some components, so if something was borderline defective, heat could push it over the edge to act up. If it was one pin on the rp2040 that’s acting up, it should affect all the keys on that particular row or column of the key matrix. But yeah, doesn’t matter much, as the keyboards aren’t made to be disassembled and repaired even if you had interest in it.
Have you contacted support? Sounds like it’s should be easy to reproduce now that you found the trigger & so easy to become relatively sure that the issue in short order.
a barely-faulty solder point on the e key would be a possible explanation. but at this point guessing what’s wrong isn’t my problem, demonstrating it to support is.
on that note, i contacted support before i started this thread (it might be hard to tell if you were squinting at the mangled text, but i mentioned sending it to support in the first post), and i even heard back from them a couple hours ago (right around my previous post), but i’m not in a position to work through the task list tonight. tomorrow morning i’ll get all of the homework done (which includes a video i’ll need better circumstances to record than my usual bed arrangement), and include the additional details i learned today.
at least now i can be modestly confident the actual problem is a materials-and-or-workmanship issue, and not the obstructed maintenance task i originally interpreted the evidence as. i trust support will make it right once i get through the flowchart. however long that takes. XD
Bummer you have had the E key go out on you. Other possibility is the acute stress to the “E” key from Minecraft or any ESDF movement game was just a little too much on top of a potentially weak solder connection/contact in the switch, etc. is what is manifesting itself. Shouldn’t be going out really, though I have seen cases where the four movement keys wore out before other keys on a keyboard.
The heat issue really points it toward a solder connection that cracked and when heated something expands and makes the gap wider. Should still be under warranty from Framework; though if it is not; fortunately it is a quick and somewhat inexpensive fix compared to other brands.
If the keyboard has diodes in the matrix for n-key rollover (I have no idea if the fw 16 is one of those) the diode on the E key would be prime suspect as it is pretty much the only thing that is exclusively connected to the e-key. It could of course also be the connection between the e-key and the row/column of the matrix ina diodeless setup.
I don’t think one can really fit in diodes easily on a traditional ultraslim laptop keyboard, so I kind of assumed they don’t use them. Also, all of the keyboards I’ve seen torn down, laptop and desktop ones, seems to use a different material to carry the matrix traces & create the contacts under the rubber domes. It’s never been the kapton / polyimide color, guessing for cost savings. So I presume it can tolerate soldering temperatures and wouldn’t be able to have diodes reflowed.
I think there is a place to define diode direction in qmk, if they are present. I’ll have to look if it’s there in the FW fireware code.
~edit~ don’t see diode direction in the places it’s said to go, info.json or config.h. I don’t know.
finally got a good replication video together (it’s always the case that problems are harder to show a technician than they are to experience on your lonesome), sent it and a bunch of answers to questions, alongside the elaboration that the problem is thermally triggered
here’s hoping the flowchart isn’t too much longer from here
so after my message to support yesterday, i was all “i understand these symptoms now, i can play minecraft on reduced framerate and quality and it’ll be fine”
two hours of that, and now the e key is totally nonresponsive, even when the machine is cool. i appear to have killed it. oops.
in other news, i hit the “reset bios and take photos of all the things” stage in the support flowchart, so maybe rma is soon.
btw, got my notice a replacement is on the way today, and they actually don’t want me to send the busted one back, so i guess i get to try to autopsy it if i feel like it. (once i have a properly working kb, anyway)
An autopsy / teardown would be excellent. I haven’t seen anyone post one yet. Also, parts could potentially be used to create a custom keyboard if one was interested, key mechanisms and the midplate pin contact parts in particular.
on of my long-term hopes is still an 18mm pitch keyboard. i’m unclear on if that can be done with these switches or not, and look forward to finding out.
plus i wanna know what the heck went wrong with this key. hope i can minimize damage during disassmbly, but i’m prtty sure SOME is unavoidable while learning how to do it.
weird to think that i might be the first, but i’ll try to document it when i get there. (gonna need to be a high health span tho, and the last week has been not that)
