My keyboard is missing a key. There’s no escape!

Well actually it wasn’t escape that was broken on my nice click-a-dee-clack Amiga 4000 keyboard, but CAPS LOCK! And bit even the key itself, it was the LED that just wouldn’t show the status. No problem, let’s take it apart

At first I thought the LED might have died after my recent diode intermezzo on the Amiga board. But measuring with my multimeter I see that the LED is just not getting any power. Let’s look at the membrane.

There was a piece of the trace missing. It seems it had corroded away. The previous owner probably spilled Coke on it. My first approach was to scratch the green cover of the existing trace so I can connect to it.

Then I covered it with some of my copper foil. I wasn’t expecting it to work, really, but it was worth a try because I didn’t have a conductive pen, and certainly soldering is not an option, unless you want to buy a new membrane (these are the same as the A500 membranes and are available). But my better half is trying to make me frugal, and we the people are creating too much e-waste anyways. So I ordered a nickel conductive pen on Amazon. It arrived today.

I connected the two distinct pieces of the trace to each other with the pen, and after the ink dried, covered it with a piece of copper foil again, for no other reason than that it is shiny. Aaaaand……:

Putting the while thing together again.

While testing, I’m actually not using the keyboard on the Amiga, but in my PC with a little adapter that I built with a cheap Arduino Pro Micro clone and tkoecker’s amigakb.

I ordered the boards through PCBWay and they’re super easy to solder. I have 9 more, because I didn’t want to pay more for shipping than the PCBs. So if you want one, drop me a note.