Drop Mech Keys Meetup Recap - Thanks for Visiting!
As you may have seen, we just hosted our first meetup in quite a while here at Drop HQ (Corsair HQ, but they seem to like us enough :) )! It was a blast to get to meet so many enthusiasts local to the bay area—it had been 10 years since I was last hanging out with keyboard nerds in the bay, at KeyCon 2014. We had a great time hosting everyone at the offices, checking out all the very nice boards y'all brought, and sharing some of our own projects/spaces! I knew it would be fun to host in the Game Room when I first saw it in person, but seeing it come to fruition was still so cool. Alright, I'll stop blabbering on now. xD Picture time! (Oh, real quick - there will be more of these! Stay tuned for more info and to catch the next one!)
May 15, 2024
I've got a number of vintage Apple Extended Keyboards that I've been wanting to modernize for ages, and one project I'd like to get off the ground is a conversion kit to modernize your Apple Extended Keyboard or Apple Extended Keyboard II (AFAIK they use the same sized PCB so I think they'd be interchangeable). The primary advantage I'm looking for in such a modernization would be adding native USB support as well as NKRO, but I'm also open to other features, like retaining one or more ADB ports so it can be used with original Apple hardware (in fact, ADB itself supports NKRO; the keyboard just lacked diodes as a money-saving measure), and also custom firmware support.
The catch: I know absolutely nothing about PCB design or getting things manufactured (I have done one of these conversions on one of my own keyboards, but it was a hand-wired job with a Teensy and it's a mess). But small-scale custom projects like this are exactly the kind of thing Massdrop does on a regular basis.
If I could drum up the interest here on Massdrop is it something that can actually be made a reality? Has this kind of thing been done?