[Coco] Mechanical keyboard upgrades for the CoCo

[Dave Philipsen]

Hey, Mark.  Do you really even need a metal support plate.  What about 
just using the PCB as the mounting?  Most board houses can do a board on 
material thicker than .0625 if you think a thicker board might be 
sturdier.  Just an idea....

Dave Philipsen


On , Mark J. Blair wrote:
> I'll do a bit of research today to look into the cost of semi-custom
> keycaps. I'm targeting 20 piece quantity, because that triggers a
> price break on the keyswitches. I still need to look into the
> connector differences on the various machines, and I won't be able to
> take apart machines to look at them until tonight.
> 
> If you had to choose one keyboard layout to rule them all, do y'all
> prefer the CoCo2 or CoCo3 arrow key arrangement?
> 
> If this starts to look remotely feasible, then I'll look into the cost
> of sheet metal fabrication in my area. Hopefully there's a shop with
> reasonable rates nearby that can do laser or waterjet cutting to make
> a proper MX support plate with CoCo mounting ears. I can do both
> mechanical and PCB design myself.
> 
> And if it looks actually feasible, maybe I could launch the build as a
> Kickstarter, so I wouldn't risk losing the production cost of 15
> keyboards out of pocket if there wasn't sufficient real interest to
> cover the production run. I'd want to make a small profit, but I
> wouldn't expect to make eating-money off of this.
> 
> --
> Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
> http://www.nf6x.net/