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Showing 1 of 1922 conversations about:
ErgoDox Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard Kit
skrooks
89
May 9, 2014
For those of you wanting the backlit version, you should be aware that it does NOT use simple 2-wire through-hole LEDs per key like most backlit keyboards. From what I've seen, it uses a single 6-contact surface mount LED and surface mount driver chip per hand. The light from that LED is sent to the keys via a light pipe with fiber optic strands that are threaded to each key position.
For both of those surface mount components, the contacts are on the bottom, not on the sides, so I'm not sure if you could use a regular soldering iron on it. I'm guessing you'd need to use a hot air rework station. (Jalli, the guy on geekhack who's working on it, used a toaster oven to reflow the solder paste.) As for the fiber optic strands, it seems to me like it would be prone to excessive bending when going from the back side of the case through the PCB thereby reducing the light intensity. Maybe I'm wrong on some of this, but I think for people that don't do this stuff as a hobby, it seems like it would be easy to mess up.
moazzamk
74
May 14, 2014
skrooksYeah, I knew about the optical wires. I had not thought its intensity would be lowered because of that. You can also use a heat gun, I'm sure for that if you want to use solder paste. A heat gun would cost about 30 dollars if that.
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