ScreamingAtTheRadio

That's a good question, I haven't measured yet. Note that you don't have to use the backlighting, it can be turned off. The new adapters also have a space for a pot or resistor (or switch if you so wish) to limit the current to all of them at once. They each have a 100Ohm resistor behind them.

That is exactly why I redesigned the adapters to not necessitate the turn. The pre-orders will get the new adapter. I've also ordered some longer cables to make everything easy. Oh, and the new adapters also have separated backlighting lines (back-compat with the old adapters), and an optional pot to tune the LED brightness.

I made a short video to show the installation of a new Decent XE keyboard inside a previously unopened 130XE:

@XL Freak I'll make sure people who have pre-orders get the layout they want. Most are asking for assembly so the layout will have to be decided in advance. There's a single, configurable board, but once it's soldered, it's hard to change.

Look at the bottom of the central part of the logo on this screenshot of your mockup, see how it flares out? That's not doing that on the original logo.

File:Atari Games Logo.svg - Wikimedia Commons

It's a difference of about $90 when comparing the same configuration with Kailh switches in both cases.

No, unless you're running software that maps the joystick port to directions.

Here's the final prototype of the full JoyKey controller. The production models will have a white enclosure (because it costs me 1/2 the price and it can always be painted, I'll include both black and white stickers): There will be a smaller version with just the cursor keys and one fire (where the Pac-Man is on this one). Do you guys think there should be a lefty version of the smaller model? (the controller is plugged into the 130XE on this picture, and is taking its power from its joystick port)

Oh absolutely, you'll get that

It required a lot of tweaking, but the latest design on low-profile switches is pretty much flush. In terms of height, both vintage and modern caps are equivalent now. In terms of feeling when typing, modern caps on full-height switches are the sh!t. The low-pro + adapter solution is visually the closest to the original (indistinguishable really) but the keys are slightly more wobbly. This is all nitpicking at this point however. I'd go for what's visually most appealing to you. Oh, one more thing to consider: function keys. With modern, you have to print your own Fn keys, and we're not 100% at a point where we have a good solution. Getting there, but it might require some painting for the end user. More news on this this week-end when I've had the time to print and paint my latest model.

Correct.

That one doesn’t exist, it was a result of an error ordering/rendering one of the prototype sets. The prod ones have a regular wide left shift. If you look at my photos of the assembled keyboards, you’ll see it’s not there.

Yes: You can see here the two jumpers on the left to configure Control or Caps, as well as the switch footprint clusters on the top-right for return, caps, break and del. Changing key functions is a lot more complex than adding extra footprints however, so anything funny with function keys is unfortunately much more complicated. I hope this clarifies.

The caps have not been ordered yet for pre-orders, so if you have an order in progress, just let me know which layout you want in a PM and we'll order the one you want. Keyboard layouts are a personal thing, and it's expected not everybody would be on-board with the changes. That's why we made it all optional

Yes, the new layout is 100% optional and somewhat configurable. If you prefer the regular vintage layout, you can still have it with the new caps, the only exception being the size of the space bar that will require populating the two switches around space. There's a set of two jumpers to the left of the board where you can choose the function of the key above left shift: caps or control. Configure it with Control, and you're back with the regular layout. The del/backspace area has space for either the two normal switches or the 2U backspace, so you just choose to have one large del/backspace or del/backspace and break. Either the old break switch or the new one right of the space bar will work the same, you just have an extra. Same for control, you can have an extra left of space, and the one in the regular position if you set the jumpers accordingly, and use a regular set of return and caps keys instead of the ISO return: there are three switch footprints there as well.

Here's the white cap set (I also sprinkled some of the fun alternate caps):

I made a revised adapter, to make it easier to connect to the current PCB: the 1st FFC pin is on the right on both boards now. It makes it way easier to get the cables secured in place without doing origami. Another difference with the previous adapters is that I'm now taking advantage of the two extra lines we have on the FFC to separate the + and GND for the backlighting. This way, you have a choice of connecting those directly to pins 3 and 1 on the adapter like it was the case before, in which case you get full power to the backlighting. That still works and is what you'd get with the old adapters. Or you can add a small potentiometer in the triangular area on the top-left and this way your backlighting can be adjusted. Or you can power it from a completely different source, if you want or need to, for whatever reason. These are the adapters that'll ship with pre-orders. By the way, one of my goals was to experiment using a flexible PCB instead of FFC to do the connection and avoid the adapter. I did make a design (that is somewhere in the repo) and uploaded it to PCBWay (JLC doesn't do flexible at this date), and man is that expensive. Like, prohibitively expensive. So until flexibles can be done for cheap in small quantities, I'm tabling that and will continue using adapter + FFC.

First look at a fully-assembled keyboard with new beige caps: Of course, since everything is modern on this, and there are no adapters, this is pretty much an actual mechanical keyboard, and a pretty good one I think. It feels amazing, the best so far and another notch above the already very pleasant vintage caps on low-pro Chocs.

OK, so I had to try. Since the LEDs are blue and the keys are red, too complementary colors, so very little light shines through and only directly above the LED, which nicely coincides with the legend. Maybe this would look better with white LEDs but I kinda like it. Anyway, you asked for it, here it is:

Yeah, I've thought about that, but the very thought of designing and printing a whole keycap set is making me tired right now But then again it's late in this very busy day and I think I need a pause... That might be a fun add-on project at some indeterminate point in the future. I also have some fun translucent red PET filament that would probably go nicely with this if I were to print a full case with it. ... but am I revealing too much? mwahahaha!

I also experimented with injecting paint into resin-printed function keys, and it works pretty well. It does take a lot of time though, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the end-user for future batches. Basically you use capillarity to get the paint to go into the legends, remove the excess and repeat until it looks decent. This is white acrylic normally used for airbrushing, which is about fluid enough. Obviously I went for the most accurate resin I have, not for one that would fit the case and other caps. I don't yet have a solution for this (you can see the terribly off color of the grey resin I own on the left). Also clearly visible here: the height of the model is not yet right.

Yeah, I was checking height here, no effort was put towards alignment in other directions, which always requires some padding and adjustments.

Better. That'll do.

Today I printed some adapters for the 2 non-Kailh low-profile switches (Gateron and RedDragon). Here's what they look like, both Atari types are present, circle and square: They work great, but are about 2mm too tall still, as should be obvious on the Fn keys. I'll modify the model and do another round tomorrow.