Membrane keycaps modified and mounted to my 3D-printed Alice-like keyboard.

Note

This was originally posted to /r/MechanicalKeyboards three months ago. I am simply reposting this now to my personal blog.

Description

Image source: https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/intex-corona-keyboard-12812562212.html

This is what I started out with:an Intex Corona membrane keyboard. I forgot to take a photo before I removed the keycap, so here's a stock image I grabbed off Google. The keyboard features those Big-Ass Enter keys and a 1u |\ key which is the reason for the mismatched keycaps in the first image.

All relevant keycaps removed.

The upper row is a bit smaller than 1u so I didn't bother removing those. The missing Pause/Break keycap was for me to test out the durability of the legends. The legends are simply printed on, but it took me and a knife to remove it, so I guess it's durable enough?

What the keycaps look like and the stem.

Definitely not Cherry MX compatible. All the keycaps also have a uniform profile, and is only 5.4mm tall without the stem.

Before and after.

I trimmed the plastic away with a flush cutter and filed it. THe plastic is quite thin at 1mm so it wasn't difficult to work with at all.

3D printed adapters. From left to right: 1u, 1.25u, 2.25u.

I designed all of them in Fusion 360. Since the keycaps are all uniform profile, it was easy to design and work with. I used cheap noname PLA to print these.

Mounted on a keycap.

I used superglue to mount these. The bottom of the stem is flush with the bottom of the keycap. Then it's just a matter of doing this for all the keycaps I needed, and placing it on the switch. Fit is a bit tighter than usual, but I think that's me overextruding with the black PLA I used.

Overall, it was a fun experiment. The keycaps aren't as tall as I like, and I prefer the sleek and sexy look of my blank black PBT keycaps, but at least my girlfriend can finally try my keyboard out without complaining where specific keys are. (Maybe I should teach her how to touch type?)

Files

Someone in the comments asked for the STLs, so I put them up along with the Fusino 360 source in this repository under the MIT license.