Kits coming soon – Tracking number updated!

Was just about to order another 4000 switches and take the hit…Decided to check the tracking number and FINALLY, after a month in Limbo, the switches have been released from Liege, the infamously slow sorting centre in Brussels.

SO, should be here next week and i can Finally get sending kits out!

Sorry again about the delays, I’ve now bought excessive stock so, should be able to turn around things quite quickly.

also built up a little stock of the keycaps which can be included in the kits at no additional postage cost

Quick new thingy for the Anycubic Photon Mono

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4817204

Found that this Bed drainer works much better, gives much more build height draining capability also.

Some Commodore Keycaps Being drained

Kits, soon…delays in receiving components

I’ve now shipped 1/2 the back orders but as always, ‘stuff’ happens.

I should have received another 4000 switches here a month ago.

They’ve been stuck somewhere , now for 3 weeks! As soon as they arrive, I’ll be shipping more kits out!

In better news, I’ve gotten through a few liters of resin, so have started printing keycaps again!

Super LED Blinkenator 2000 – Beta …Err, lost count!

BETA 12….ALMOST IDENTICAL TO BETA 11

Beta 11 had a minor cock-up in that i’d missed off the 3v3 line. I’ve also taken the oportunity to shift things around a bit, re-align stuff and generally do a lot of really picky small stuff that generally makes me feel a bit better. Except that upside down C22 that i’ve just spotted, D’oh!

Also, I now introduce 2 more members of the Super LED Blinkenator 2000 family

The Clampinator

This one, you’ve kind of met before. It’s a small ‘clamp’ PCB, but it now splits into two parts. One ‘spacer / shim’ sits in-between the Clampy larger bit, the other, is the clampy larger bit.

When installed, it’ll look a little something like this…..

Blue is the Next PCB. Red is the tiny thin break-off ‘spacer’. Black is the Blinkenator.

The Red ‘shim’ part stops the yellow clamping PCB from getting too close to the Blinkenator when the screws and nuts are tightened.

That combination of PCB’s, copper balls, nuts & bolts provides a robust electrical contact to J15 – Without needing to solder. Yes, it’s a little fiddly – I’ll make some instructions.

Another Member – The Programminator

Glorified serial to USB convertor

Now i’ve switched over to a SMT atmega chip, it needs programming. I’ve bought some of the important signals out to a PCI EXpress connector to make for me, at Bleugh.Biz headquarters to quickly program the on-board arduino and test some basic features.

I thinkn REV 2 of this board could be useful for general tinkering also, so i’ll probably do a limited run to sell if people really want them. I’ll send out a handful of REV1 of this board to the BETA testers, IF BETA12 works.

And, finally – a quick overview of the new layout and routing. I’m now confident enough in the design to use a copper pour for a much more professional finish!

Keycaps pictures

A quick post to show the keycaps being sent.

There’s no painting,

The letters are recessed into the keycaps and are very legible.

I’m working out postage costs as right now they’re still large letter in size here in the UK.

I probably won’t ship all of them them ‘on the supports’ as that doubles the weight

To fit them you just clip them onto your key switches

Example of a B Grade Set – note the blemishes on the F Keys

An example of an A Grade set – no obvious blemishes

Painting. I haven’t been able to find an effective way to do that my end. A few suggestions have come in, maybe White clay would work well finished with laquer.

C64 Mini Keyboard kits stock – First emails being sent out

Hi All,

I’ve now packed up 10 kits ready to be shipped and have emailed the first 10 people on the waiting list.

It’s been an expensive couple of months with the bad PCB’s and wrong arduinos, but, payday at the day job was two days ago, so i’ve already ordered enough additional parts to make everyone happy within a few weeks

I’ll work may way up through the waiting list and let you all know when I can finally make general stock available.

C64 upMini Keyboard kit – stock coming shortly

My New PCB’s will be here today! DHL shipping is expensive, but great when you need stuff quickly!

What this means – I should have general stock next week.

Timeline – I’ll get a test board built up this week. if that works, I’ll email out everyone who expressed an interest.

I’ll get everything kitted up through the week (time permitting) so I can get some posted this weekend.

The rest of the weekend will be spent kitting up everything I have so I can start selling again.

Sorry for the delay guys (and gals). Been a perfect storm of wrong components sent, big customs delays, non-functional PCB’s. I thought the ‘march’ timeline was generous and had plenty of padding in for worst case.

For general availability, i’ll be reviewing the price. Most things have gone up by over 20% in general (Brexit, Yaay), some have come down, and i’ve made some optimisations. These projects aren’t a get rich quick scheme for me, they’re just a way for me to get funds together to buy more tools and things to make more projects! It’s pretty much a cost neutral hobby 😛

One final update – Keycaps. I’ve started manufacturing and at the time of typing, I have sent out a few test items to kit owners. I’ll await some feedback before I can hit ‘go’ and make more.

Those are just some of the prints i’ve had to do to get to where I am now. This isn’t representative of the typical resin printing workflow. its generally a bit easier than this, BUT, I had to start from scratch, learning how to do everything, including stuff that hasn’t been done by others. AND I needed the base level print to be ‘perfect’ to avoid the need to paint them. There’s over 80 hours of actual printing time in this picture, on top of that, there’s the cleanup time, CAD time, setup time….these are the ‘successful’ failures, there’s almost as much again that i’ve binned due to total failures, where keycaps were unusuable for anything, not even experiments (as these ones have been used for). fortunatley most of those failures were caught early to avoid too much wasted resin….but when I get only 1 chance in the evenings on some days to quickly iterate, get the printer going, 1 failure can set me back a few days.

Anyways, now i’ve finalised everything……..

I’ve used an entire bottle of resin over the last couple of weeks making test manufacturing prints back to back to tune the process, changing nothing, just print, print, print… By that, I mean, it’s…

• Print
• Remove Print, clean up
• top up resin
• print
• Cure cleaned up print
• repeat until bottle is empty

I’m now at about 70% success rate for good saleable keycaps. the other 20% have minor blotches or surface uniformity issues, so i’ll sell those discounted for those that are interested. I’m still getting about 1 in 1o that can’t be used in any way.

Good enough, and i’m sure i’ll get better as time goes on. Each print takes 6.5 hours – slow, but reliable and a 25uM layer height so about as good as it gets on resin printing for surface finish.

Each print also takes another 30 minutes or so to ‘turn around’ –

• Remove from bed
• clean bed
• set printer up again to print the next item
• clean print (1 minute soak in IPA, then 5 minutes in ultrasonic bath then another couple of minutes under a warm running tap)
• Dry Print – This is critical to good finishes. Some are taking up to 3 days, overnight in cardboard boxes near the radiator. I need to do a few checks in that time to ‘dab off’ excess moisture that leeches out of the print. Any moisture left on the tops of the keycaps alters the surface finish.
• Cure print – this takes time also. I’ve found using UV lights (wash and cure station) warps the keys more often than not. Once the caps are dry, I leave them a couple of days in the conservatory. After that, i’ll blast them for a few minutes under UV light to finish the curing
• Then it’s pack them up ready for posting!

And, Pack some up, ready for posting I have! I’ve done a mix of ‘on the supports’ and ‘loose in bags’ to see how these things go. I’ve posted a couple to myself via friends overseas to see if they survive!. once I know what i’m doing is working, I’ll make them available for sale!

8 sets of keycaps ready to go, waiting feedback from testers before I can ship!

C64 Mini Keyboard Kit – Progress on stock

Hi All,

Quick update –

Arduino’s are still stuck in Limbo. I received 50 incorrect ones a long while back, ordered another 50 and they’ve been stuck somewhere in the UK for a couple of weeks now. I did order 10 locally at about 2x the price I normally pay to work through some of the waiting list, but that exhaused my supply of PCB’s

So, I ordered back at the beginning of February some more PCB’s

They arrived yesterday, and, I quickly soldered one up to test, so I can start ‘kitting up’ the keyboard kits.

I may have discovered an issue with the way that i’m Using EASYEDA, which has recently shown up in an EASYEDA update….it could be a bug, or a behaviour change, but, it’s B0rked my PCB!

This will set back the kit availability a couple of weeks whilst I address it and get new boards made. I know what the issue is, I can re-create it and have a work around to order more PCB’s so it’s no major worry

Here’s the C64 Keybaord matrix that i’m using. I’ve always used number prefixes for the number keys. i.e. if it’s A, I’ve used the PREFIX A, 1, Prefix 1, etc , etc.

Something changed in EASYEDA a couple of months ago which now means that Prefixes with a single digit number now all seem to tie their nets together.

Here’s the resulting PCB – Note, the nets for the centre pins are all the same!

I didn’t spot this in the one that I just had made! and despite the thoroughly heroic efforts of the JLCPCB staff to fix a couple of cockups i’d made , I have to now trash this batch .

Here’s what happens when I select the Net – ALL the numbers light up as they’re all connected!. oops

Ah well, off to learn a little more about EASYEDA, quite an expensive mistake though, but this shows why, when you make changes, testing is important.

You can imagine how amused I was when I discovered that EVERY key worked on my board, except the number keys, which only typed 0 or 9 !

In other news – I purchased one of these

An Ultrasonic Cleaner – Dual Frequency 28KHz and 40KHz. I’ll do another post about it later.

All i can say now is WOW – No need for the wash and cure station now! – this thing superbly and consistently cleans the prints, giving a good surface finish. Prior to this, it was impossible to get a good finish on every key, every time. Now, i’m 4 prints in , and 3 are perfect, 1 is crap due to over-cleaning! I’m dialled in and ready for production

Blinkenator – Beta 11

Have had quite a few ‘spare’ hours to tinker these past few weeks. Finally have gotten over a little bit of a hill and put some development time back into the SUPER LED BLINKENATOR 2000

Thanks to some fellow hardware developers for keeping me sane!.

The changes to this board – Mainly switching from a soldered on Arduino Pro Micro to using a discreet Atmega328p chip which is commonly found in the Arduino Pro Mini

My previous choice of Micro was mainly driven by attempting economies of scale and using the same one for the C64 Mini keyboard kit as this. Also, a desire to allow people to ‘program up’ their own Blinkenator board – The Atmega32u4 is a bit of an overkill for a handful of LED’s though. Importantly also, prices of arduinos have risen quite a bit since Brexit . Changing to a chip saves easily 60% in hardware costs over the soldered on Arduino, it also saves a handful of minutes in soldering!

It does introduce a little more complexity – I now need to figure out how to ICSP – In Circuit Serial Programmin works as i’ll need to burn an Arduino bootloader to each one.

I’ll also need to develop (or modify) a Programmer to allow a more day-day use of the device over UART to USB

Next step, port the Blinkenator to the 328p, test, if it works, Order Beta11

Oh, the Ball clamps are working superbly, just gotta be careful of feature creep on that clampinator board now!

oh, probably will look at swapping the JST connector footprints to SMT – would be nice if I can have just the

Nailed it! Commodore 64 mini keycaps.

Good enough to eat!

CAD is final now! The keycaps fit perfectly . They latch on with a push and can be removed!

Tolerance!

The mechanical, fitty holey type tolerance, not the other type of ‘oh, that’s annoying, but i’ll put up with it’ type….

Here’s the keyswitch fitting into the space bar. zoom in. we’re talking fractions of a millimeter fit, which I can achieve consistently and reliably! there’s about 0.1 mm available on the sides with the latches and about 0.2mm availavle on the longer sides. the extra really being there to allow some grace when placing the keycap on to fit it. less clearance means it’s a royal pain to get the switch located into the hole.

BUT, the keys don’t ‘latch’ into place on the switches. So, to try to address that (if it’s even possible) i’m now adding a small feature

See that bit in Blue!

This is the underside of one of the ‘F’ Keys. That small part in blue is a 0.1mm ridge sat about 0.8mm up from the bottom and 1mm from the top. I’m hoping that will be enough to latch the keys on, AND allow ease of fitting without breaking the keycaps. Everything else is done now, this is the only barrier to releasing. I’ll run off a print tomorrow to see how it works out. I’ll run off further prints with this sticking out even more if i need to

Just one more Tweaketto! Give it to me…C64 keycap sales are soon to be..

Nailed it!

Happy chappy this morning. They finished printing last night, my draining widget worked a treat – I’ll put a quick GIF up soon.

But, forgot about them until a mad panic at close to 1AM remembering I’d left them on the printer. With these, you can’t as the resin in the concave surfaces will part set in the morning and cause an uneven surface.

So, quickly washed them in IPA, regretted it immediately as it was dirty. Did another wash in IPA to clean the resin and straight to the hot water tap and larger bowl with a brush to clean off the bits. I’ll strain out the bowl later.

Final tweak needed now is the amount of grip to the switches themselves, shrinkage is variable at the moment, can’t go too small or keycaps may break when putting on, can’t go too big or they’ll be too wobbly and fall off.

May need to go middle ground and require a tiny blob of something sticky in each keycap, I’ll know soon enough!

Space Bar, The final frontier

The final hurdle for ‘good enough’ for me now is the space bar.

Every key prints lovely, except the largest one……Take a look

Eeeeew, kinda looks like a ….

I’ve gotten all the ‘hard stuff’ over and done with first, or so I thought. Life’s taught me to generally avoid going for the low hanging fruit first, save the easy stuff for later when you need a boost.

Well, no matter what i’ve done (so far) in 12 iterations, have I been able to get a good looking space bar.

Now this has become my sole focus and roadblock for a successful print

Turns out that this is a combination of quite a few variables, I’ll list a few and probably follow up another time with clicky links and research

• Exposure times are wrong –
  • They could be , I’ve really just gone and shoved stuff in to print and hoped for the best with standard settings. I Have now tweaked up the settings a little bit to 2.2s per layer due to mixing pigment in, and have had no real failures. I’ve also increased the first layers exposure times to 30s, still seeing minor issues there
• FEP tension is wrong
  • Not really, This is a brand new printer, i’ve had zero catastrophic failures and have been overly cautious monitoring (and catching) early delamination from the print bed issues – Three times now
• Bad Resin
  • Possibly. I’ve 3 types (all anycubic) and seeing the same on all 3
• Temperature
  • Possibly, lots of people have been reporting issues in cold climates, I use the printer in the conservatory and it’s sub 10 degrees C in there regularly
  • Low temperatures cause increased viscosity and warpage issues with fine features from the FEP pulling them through the thicker resin

• MY FAVOURITE
  • Exposure –
    • Too low exposure times on fine edges cause resin to cure, but not as hard as it should. So, when the layer sets on the bed, when it’s pulled off the FEP, it warps as it’s soft. This, I believe is causing the sagging issues i’m seeing on that space bar – it’s printed upside down, so the supports hold the points up, and between the walls sag, like an electric line held between two pylons

My solution……

Probaly waaay too many supports, but this way, each ‘sag’ will be between supports that are just 1mm apart.

I’ve also nearly doubled the wall thickness to about 1.8mm – from 1mm

Blue lines show original thickness, gold shows it doubled

Hopefully now, this is the last step, Colour’s good, CAD is good, Supports are good.

I’ve ordered 2 Litres of clear resin ready to go and have a colour that’s not exact, but close and, importantly , very easy to re-create

Resin8 Earthy Brown, 3 ‘blobs’ of the end of a lollypop stick to 100ml of resin. and Black, 1 blob.

– The Rich brown used previously was too red. I’ll experiment a little with more black when running off the final tests

https://www.resin8.co.uk/opaque-resin-pigment—earthy-brown-7468-p.asp

https://www.resin8.co.uk/opaque-resin-pigment—black-2383-p.asp

Coming soon!, more kits in stock, and Keycaps – March 2021!

Anycubic Photon Print Bed drainer STL – posted to Thingiverse

Whilst developing the Commodore 64 mini keycaps and iterating the prints, it came clear that the caps are little buckets that hold quite a lot of resin.

I’ve been holding the keyboard over the tray to drain all this resin out, and it takes “ages”

So, when you can use CAD and have a few 3D printers , you go and spend time developing a widget to optimise the amount of time holding a build plate at an angle!

And by “spend time”, and “optimise”, I mean, take longer doing in CAD than the total amount of time that would have been spent holding the bed in the first place

I present….

60 degrees! version 1

Total amount of time in CAD, and reworking, maybe 3 hours…

Total amount of time holding a bed to drain, maybe 3 minutes.

Number of beds to hold to recoup time in CAD…60!

So, after 60 prints, I’ll have broken even on the time invested in making the thing!

Here it is in action!

Version 1 wasn’t as optimal, it needed shifting over to the left by about 30mm to give far more clearance on the case for everyone not printing 25mm high keycaps to be able to use.

60 degrees, version 2!

Released on Thingiverse – right here – for free! works a treat.

Is that a space bar in your pocket (sized C64 Mini) ?

Trial run 13 underway with the resin prints. Colour should be pretty close, and Supports fairly optimal.

Trial 12 failed due to insufficient base size on the supports, caught it at 5% so no problem there other than a quick cleanup. I’ll know how it’s gone in about 5 hours!

Also, did a quick tweak on the space bar! I’m printing both new and old to see how they come out

Do animated GIF’s work here?

Did some work on the Blinkenator also, and got sidetracked quite significantly with Fusion360’s parametric sketches. watch those tangent curves and how you constrain them!.

Mwahahahaha! C64 mini keycaps! The final furlong :-)

Has some successes with varying mixes of pigments! Wifey demanded I do a bronze one.

Fine adjustments needed only now and it’ll be a wrap.

….problem is, fine adjustments’ll probably take another 80% of the total :-p

Now, gotta figure out how to get Arduinos quickly as 50 wrong ones just turned up and due to Chinese New Year my expedited (expensive) DHL delivery won’t leave for a couple of weeks, D’oh! Best laid plans….

Well, final furlong for the 3D printing part anyway! Next step, investigating colouring in

Oops! One of these is near, the other is far away!

Keycaps! C64 mini stuff

Doing some sideways progress now.

When planning something, always allow time for ‘unseen’ stuff, or even anticipated issues that probably show up but you hope they don’t.

Is that a banana in your c64 mini or are you just happy to see me?

I’ve had two partially failed prints now, one fully expected and designed deliberately to see just how far I can remove supports or just how many I need to add

And, the one you see above. A large part of the bed failed to adhere so I stopped at 65%, just enough to recover the space bar…should have waited to 70% so I could grab a few of the bottom row also.

I’ve noticed slight warping in all prints but haven’t been that concerned till this failure.

On the plus side though, my new pigment colours arrived !

Yes, it’s reddy. So, it’s not ready.

I now have a grip on how the colours mix and can iterate a little closer to the original brown now! It doesn’t help that I’m red/green colourblind so, matching brown, in the evenings , in the conservatory in non optimal lighting is probably a worst case scenario for me :-p

But, I can get close now and can get the wife to tweak the formula

One thing I’ve noted is that it can get expensive iterating colors in resin prints! I’m mixing 100ml at a time now, to start a new colour I’m dumping the old 100ml into my grey bottle! Can’t wait to see what colour that comes out as.

now, back to the print fails

First – Levelling. Seems my bed has become unlevel a little, so, I’ll need to re-level. This seems to be an excellent tutorial which i’ll follow.

Now, the warping. It’s something that I didn’t really experience much with my standard Filament printer, but now I clearly can see that it’s a common, but surmountable issue with Resin printers.

So, some research

I’ll need to re-design the space bar at least!.

https://www.3dhubs.com/knowledge-base/how-design-parts-sla-3d-printing/

How to design parts for SLA 3D Printing

And

https://www.3dhubs.com/knowledge-base/how-design-parts-sla-3d-printing/

I’d put a small re-enforcement bar all along the space bar which seems to have been an error and may well be causing more warping!

I’ll do another post with the re-design!

JLCPCB – A small gushing appraisal

I know i’ve already made one blog post about these guys, but they really do seem to go over and above! why i’m posting again is at the bottom

https://jlcpcb.com/

How I found them….

Me, I’m a early 40’s bloke with a wife, two young kids and a passion for gadgety stuff that’s not really that mainstream. I really don’t get as much time as i’d like for tinkering, but when I do, I tend to be lazy and take the easy route to making things overly complicated 😛

Back 3 years ago, I purchased a lovely reproduction case from Retro Radionics for an old Sinclair Spectrum 48k . It was limited edition, fully chrome. I just had to buy it…..

C64 Mini Keyboard – Rev 4 PCB experiments

This’ll be a while away yet, but the REV4 PCB, has some new, experimental features that will possibly allow some extra functionality when used with stuff other than a C64 mini!

For the purposes of this kit though, the board is a little easier to solder due to slightly larger pads, I’ve also added silk screen ‘dots’ to the rear to show the only two pads you actually need to solder (or possibly one of the two if i’ve gone and goofed up the positioning! ).

I’ve removed the USB HELPER pads, these weren’t actually that useful

The other thing being added are pads that say ‘Joy’ – I’ve no idea if this will work, but my plan is to see if there’s any way to map the C64 Joystick onto the keyboard and then into a PC / MiSTer or other device with a USB socket. I’m putting these unpopulated pads on production boards as, now due to Brexit, it costs a fortune in customs fees and shipping for small orders of prototypes. I mayaswell order 50 boards which are tried and tested, with small mods on. If the mods don’t work, no loss – the boards still function just as sold.

If they work, AND i can develop the firmware, AND the software then it may add useful features for some people! But, my focus right now is getting the mini version perfect and not any extra features that require a lot of time for me to learn how to enable! If they’re ever enabled, i’ll probably spin them into a SMT only board so I can sell a ready assembled version for a little cheaper than the £60 i’m currently selling for

Also on this one, i’ve fixed the C64 header pin ordering to save people having to make an adaptor cable due to me swapping two columns and putting the rows in reverse!, D’oh!.

Anyways, enough waffle – on with the pictures!

C64 mini keyboard kit keycaps – Rev 6 and 7

Couple of successful prints! Rev 6 – just binging in stuff and hoping it works.

Rev 7 – more scientific and better CAD – all letters are now 0.2mm wider and deeper. This tiny tweak shows spectacularly well just how big a difference small changes can make.

Still some more CAD to do but soo close to final now!

Bottom row and space bar is Rev 7. Top 3 rows are Rev 6

Closeup of the better definition.

And, finally, the print itself. I’ve learned that supports are critical here. Lots of them!

There’s actually as much material here in the supports as there is in the keycaps, but if you scrimp a little and try to reduce the amount, check out the top left of the picture below. I lost the return key and a few smaller keys were taken with it.

This was a calculated ‘risk’ by leaving this section to just have the standard auto generated supports, every other area had super dense supports.

There will be a middle ground, which I’m working on as I’d like to offer these cheaply…less resin used = cheaper to make!

Also, note the rest of the supports. THey are SO EASY to remove. When I offer these keycaps for sale, again to reduce cost, I’ll probably leave them as you see here. Makes for more robust packing and if you decide to paint them, you already have them held down on a convenient stand!

Cured and partly disassembled

Sweet like chocolate! (C64 mini key caps)

Well, experiment 1 worked a treat!

I purchased this pigment from Resin8

https://www.resin8.co.uk/opaque-resin-pigment—rich-brown-9247-p.asp

Added a blob – maybe 1-2ml worth off the end of a lollipop stick

Stirred that in with 150ml (well, about 150g by weight as that’s far easier, and it’s close enough) of Anycubic grey resin

And….

Very happy! Considering this is literally bunging stuff in and seeing what happened.

Still some way to go now to try the other clear resin and white resins, also tweaking the colours

Also have I some distortion issues on these keys but those are under control as there’s a very clear relationship between support structures and distortion/warping and underside finish!

I think I’m on track for a March launch!

Anyone for a Brownie? (C64 Brown!)

Started a print tonight! Version 6 🙂

That colour may not look correct but it’s not intended to be perfect,

I need to iterate this process slowly and scientifically so I can recreate the colour at any time.

Best place to start is from a known working point and changing a single variable at a time to get to where you want to be

Here, I’m starting with the resin I know works – drab grey.

I’m adding an unknown if it works brown pigment just to see what happens!

If that prints, I can try adding black pigment to make it darker brown.

If it doesn’t, I can try using a CMYK mix of colours to make the correct Brown

Once I get that shade, I can try different resin bases to see what gives the best finish! Maybe clear + brown or white +CMYK will do the job!

I’ll be iterating the CAD model and the colouring at the same time!

Hopefully this new CAD model will fix the minor offset issues with the keyboard, shifting all the keys slightly to the right also allowing me to finally reveal a working test fit!

One small thing I picked up when test fitting my first attempt, I’d not perfectly centred the left shift key button and Return buttons on the PCB. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things as hacking your own keycaps doesn’t need perfect alignment on the wider keys, only the 1 wide keys

Where it is annoying though is I can’t correct this error or any keycaps I make now won’t perfectly align on old keyboards! Heh, what’s 1/2mm between friends eh!

All kits posted! (Except for 1 assembled)

If you’ve purchased a kit this past couple of weeks, it’s now been posted.

I’ve only 1 remaining kit to post, but first I have to solder it (Mr L D from Italy, I’ll start it this weekend)

I’m doubling down on keycap development now, hoping to have those ready in time for new stock

Let’s say March 1st to be safe, hopefully a little sooner if parts arrive quicker 🙂

C64 Mini Keyboard Kits – Now awaiting stock

Hi All,

It’s been a rollercoaster few days with the Retro Receipies Youtube video.

I’ve now run out of some components for the C64 Mini keyboard kit. More have been ordered, I’m just waiting on a last few people to send over payment and i’ll pause things for a few weeks until parts arrive.

I’m hoping that the delay also will help some focus to drive the keycap development and a feature change to the PCB

I have to say Thankyou to Perrifractic for reaching out and increasing the profile of this little kit, and that the response has been unexpected. This is a little hobby that I have in my spare time between juggling the bill-paying day job and the wife and kids, it gives me the pocket money to buy more gizmos to help develop these gizmos.

I ordered most of the ‘long lead time’ parts last week, so i’d expect it to now be mid-late february before I can sell more full kits.

Hello!

Just a quick ‘Hi’ to anyone popping in from Retro Recipes!

And, if you’re just browsing here due to something else, go, have a look at Retro Recipes!

Whilst you’re there, go check out my “This Old Tony” style cameo in the video 🙂 ! yes, that’s official, it’s my HOLLYWOOD DEBUT!.

Oh, And it’s a little video about the C64 Mini keyboard kits, and a little reveal!

And, to get in touch, ping an email to KEYBOARDS AT Bleugh.biz

Cheers

Dean

3D printing – UV Curing Resins

Not sure where i’ll be going with this post, but here goes anyway

The CAD work progresses with the C64 mini keyboard keycaps and it’s getting close to the time where I need to be thinking about the end-game, the final product.

I can’t imagine that people will be happy with some watery grey colour, most would prefer at least some semblence to the original breadbin colours!

So, i’ve done some quite considerable googling on the subject

.Also, figured that ‘painted’ stuff used to commonly use the RAL standard to determine a standardised final colour, maybe there’s a RAL colour for commodore keycaps? (there’s one for the case!)

Turns out that finding 3D printer resin in the colour you want, isn’t easy

Also, turns out that creating your own 3D printer resin colour also, isn’t quite fully tried and tested yet

https://formlabs.com/uk/blog/medical-dyeing-coloring-sla/

a fantastic website –

https://www.3dprintedminiature.com/how-do-i-dye-resin-3d-prints/

and, many, many more websites were found, all with various anecodes, photos and information regarding colourant successes and failures

One colourant kit that kept cropping up – https://monocure3d.com.au/product-category/cmyk-pigment-set/?v=322b26af01d5 The Monocure CMYK kit.

So, it looks like if I want to create my own coloured resin, I’ll have to mix it myself.

So, where to start, and what ‘stuff’ to use to dye it?

Turns out that there’s a distinct terminology that may need to be used to figure out just what the process of colouring resin is.

https://letsresin.com/blogs/articles/epoxy-pigment-guide-what-is-a-pigment-in-resin-art

has an interesting summary.

However, for my purposes of colouring the resin..

If I use a Dye – the colours will likley be a little more ‘washed out’

so, i’ll need to use a Pigment – essentially an insoluble bunch of micro particles that sit in suspension in the resin and create a solid, opaque colour! – AKA Dark brown.

So, off to google to figure out Pigments

There’s pigments for Casting resins, Resins, Acrylics, everything…..Except, a clearly stated pigment that’s suitable for 3D printer resin!

Infact, just what is 3D printer resin? what chemicals

I found this website which goes into some depth about resin types

Also found another website that does resin pigments in a range of RAL colours

BUT, they go on about Polyester, epoxy, and I’ve no idea if those things are compatible with the Anycubic resin i’m using

Another google and, I come up with a chemicals safety sheet for some Anycubic resins –

Listed there is a key component – which ends in “acrylate” and “diacrylate”…

so, looks like it’s an acrylic / acrylate based resin? can’t say i’m a chemistry expert but an Acrylate is a group of chemicals, so i’ll run with that

I need to look for pigments suitable for use in Acrylates!

But, err, is it an Acrylated Epoxy, or an Acrylated polyester, or even something else?

2-hydroxy-1-(4-(4-(2-hydroxy-2-methylpropionyl)benzyl)phenyl)-2-methylpropan-1-one is part of it!

Still clueless

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/22019754#section=Depositor-Supplied-Patent-Identifiers

has some amazing information, including use in photosensitive resins

I’ve found a few websites that suggest urethrane acrylates are the go for UV resins

or, is it Acrylate polymers, or Epoxy Polymers!…….I’m leaning away from epoxy

SO, here goes – a quick google for Acrylate Polymer Pigment

I give up!. I’m just gonna buy a couple of bottles of ‘stuff’ and just see what works, This stuff seems to be recommended, and cheap, it’s brown and dyes resin, what can go wrong!

Super LED Blinkenator 2000 – Scrrew it.

Had to admit, the failure of the Beta 9 got to me a little bit. Took me a couple of days to take stock, stand back and think.

After much thinking, about life, being married, kids and generally having to work hard at a day job, remembering about that one time where that bloke ripped you off, Postulating how things can build up and get to you to the point where you just think that getting screwed and having your balls in a vice would be more preferable………..

You can come to yet another epiphany!….Screw it and put the Balls, in a vice.

I present to you……..The precursor to the release candidate for the production version….Err

The Balls don’t really work :-( [EDIT – Now they do!]

D’oh!, Blinkenator Beta 9 board arrived. Powers up just fine and works ok too

BUT….I Can’t seem to get quite enough clamping force with the balls between the PCB’s to get a reliable I2c connection.

Surprisingly, as the power is closer to the edge of the connector, it powers up reliably, 100% of the time! the I2c is right at the centre where the most flex is, so makes the least contact……

If I really press hard, it works a treat.

Couple of possible options open now

1 – Something very stiff jammed inside and use the case itself to press against the board (I don’t like this)

2 – Some other, softer conductive metal thing

3 – yet another redesign (TM) – I have some ideas, but i’m concerned at the spring forces required to obtain a contact

4- give up on a ‘solderless’ design. – I’m trying hard to not alienate a bunch of people by requiring soldering, but at some point I may need to call it quits. With the new VAT rules kicking in, more parcels are being charged VAT and handling…prototyping has gone up by 25%!

Just a quick update to say I’m still working on it

C64 Mini – Cheap and easy keycap ‘solution’

It’s taking ages to get progress on the 3D printed keycaps, I’m so close, but still have a few months of tweaking until I get it perfect enough to consider it a saleable item. watch this space 🙂

In the interim, I went and purchased a bunch of these

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001616660795.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dI4vhMo

They’re a “100Pcs A28 Tactile Push Button Switch Cap 6*5.1mm Applies to 5.8*5.8 7*7 8*8 8.5*8.5 Self-Locking Switch Button Cap”

And, judge for yourself……

Old school!

Err.

Well, it’s more comfortable than nothing, and certainly opens up some options for unusual keyboards in the future 😛

yes, it’s not perfect, BUT for £1.68 you can have non painful pokey bits and actually do a reasonable job of typing on basic

or, splash out £3.36 and go for a dual colour like I did 😛

BONUS PRIZE TIME………………..[edit, grabbed by someone! ]

THE first person to order a kit and mention that they want these keycaps, I’ll chuck in a set of grey/black ones as pictured for nothing – I purchased enough to do properly do 2.5 keyboards, or 3 if you don’t mind a mix / match of black and grey!

Note, if you’re ordering your own keycaps off aliexpress, the internal dimension is key here, they fit, you can go a little smaller

the absolute maximum external dimension is 9mm, this leaves about 0.48mm clearance between keycaps.

Woo, Featured on Retro Recepies youtube!

That’s right, A few of you found me from Mr Perri Fractic’s channel on Youtube

The Video, 27 minutes in!, ME!!

There’ll be a little more coming up i’ve been told!

Highly recommend if you like anything slightly retro, give his channel a watch, superb production quality to it, great sense of humour and , generally seems to be a lovely chap that really brings out your inner childhood enthusiams for these weird old gadgets that a lot of us love.

Also, he’s getting close to 100,000 subscribers, so definitely is doing something right

Thanks Mr Fractic!