Hackaday readers are likely the kind of folks that have a favorite keyboard, so you can probably imagine how devastating it would be to find out that the board you’ve sworn by for years is going out of production. Even worse, the board has some internal gremlins that show up after a few years of use, so functional ones in the second-hand market are becoming increasingly rare. So what do you do?
This is the position [TechBeret] recently found himself in with his beloved Sculpt keyboard. When Microsoft decided to step back from the peripheral market last year, he started looking at alternatives. Finding none of them appealing, he decided instead to breathe new life into the ergonomic keyboard with the RP2040. Every aspect of the resurrection is covered in a phenomenally detailed write-up on his blog, making this a valuable case study in modernizing peripherals with the popular microcontroller.
According to [TechBeret], the biggest problem with the Sculpt was its wonky wireless hardware. It was bad enough that the board was permanently paired to its USB dongle, but apparently, the RF side of things would degrade over time, leading to an ever shorter range. So he decided the best course of action was to simply give the board a brain transplant. Since he didn’t really want it to be wireless anyway, he figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to create a replacement PCB that reads the keyboard matrix and speaks USB Human Interface Device (HID).
Checking the fit with a 3D-printed PCB
In fact, he was able to find a couple of projects that did that exactly. Instea ..
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