A500 Mini Keyboardification Chapter two, part 3 – PCB’s

I’ve spent a couple of days designing, and and a today, spent nearly a hundred quid at JLCPCB ordering a bunch of prototypes

The first revision of the Keyboard PCB

First ‘space sample’ of the top mounting board.

Floppy Disc Micro SD card holder!

Rear of the floppy discc.

I had to bite the bullet and spend some money as I now need to move on with the Keycap CAD. I have a big concern about the fitting of the printed keycaps onto the smaller switches. I’ve gone with ALPS switches as they used to be a huge brand name back in the day and i’m hoping should provide some consitency.

The prototypes will help also to test and develop the PRK Firmware i’m planning to use.

The ‘Clamp’ adaptor is fairly non-functional. It has a Rasperry Pi Pico footprint onboard and a 40 pin FPC style connector to act as a ‘stand-in’ for the Raspberry pi Pico which is currently on the back of the main PCB.

The whole idea of the ‘clamp board’ is to allow an ‘ease’ of installation – I’ll use some Pogo Pins to sit on the test pads by the 3 USB sockets on the back of the A500 Main board.

The plan is to have a basic matrix keyboard PCB, which connects to the clamp board via the 40 pin FPC.

The clamp then accesses the USB and hopefully it can all be fairly easy to assemble.

I’m also testing the Fake floppy connection with the clamp board – no idea if that’ll work or not, we’ll see.

Now the long-ish wait for Aliexpress to deliver my connectors, pogo pins, and a couple of weeks for the Cheapest post option of JLCPCB to ship the assembled keyboard! – nearly 100 switches and diodes on this one, those can be automated in assembly. I’ll need to hand solder on the rear the FPC connector but those are easy enough!

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