- Joined
- Apr 16, 2002
- Location
- Seattle, WA
Deck keyboards are individually back-lit mechanical keyboards of extremely high quality. They come in several colors but never quite the right one. I am starting off with the blue lit Deck Legend (linear) keyboard. My main use for this keyboard is gaming, and will be reflected in the mod. The mod seems simple, it is to replace a few of the blue LED's with red LED's. With this keyboard it is harder than it looks however.
I could spend a few paragraphs explaining why mechanical keyboards are far superior to regular cheap keyboards, or why the decks are amazing, but there is already a great explanation of it on overclock.net
The keyboard is very easy to open, and their warranty covers modding! There are 11 screws on the back and then the 2 shells just pop off the PCB and support brace. Once the keyboard is opened you see this:
Thats 105 mechanical key switches and 109 leds. Every single key and led combination needs to be removed in order to access the resistors on the PCB below the aluminum support brace which makes the keyboard extremely rigid. You could easily use this keyboard as a weapon hehe...
Now for a bit of math. There are 105 switches that need to be removed and 106 LED's. That means there are 422 solder joints that need to be desoldered to remove the brace. This would take hours with braid or a manual solder sucker. Thats why they make these:
It is a hakko 808 desoldering gun. With a tool like this you can desolder the entire keyboard in about half an hour.
Top row removed:
Now normally you would have to follow the traces to find which resistors you need to switch but, Deck provides you with a PCB schematic that makes life much easier. The next step is to remove the existing SMD resistors for the keys you want to switch and replace them with the correct value. Note: The red and yellow decks use a different method of powering the LED's (in pairs with 1 resistor per pair), to run more than one color you have to switch the entire keyboard to the blue, green, and white method.
I found that 560ohm resistors worked best for my replacement 1.8v 20mah 3mm led's. It allows the red to be brighter than the blue at lower brightness settings and the same brightness at higher settings. The keyboard has 6 different brightness settings so you don't blind yourself with the keyboard. I was unable to locate SMD resistors at my local electronics store so I used some 1/8w resistors instead. Slightly harder to solder but not any worse than the SMD ones.
Once I soldered in all of the replacement resistors it was time to reassemble.
The tricky part of reassembly is holding in each individual LED as it gets soldered into place. Simply bending the legs does not provide enough support to solder them in facing straight up. This was easily the most time consuming part of the project.
Then it was testing time. Apologies for the blurry picture, I will need to find my tripod to take lit pictures. Two of the LED's were soldered in with reversed polarity so I had to switch them back (right ctrl and enter).
It is hard to photograph the keyboard in the daytime these two pics are the best I could do.
(Low exposure time to simulate darker enviroment)
I will have some actual night time pictures of it tonight. Like most lighting mods it does not photograph well.
I have been thinking of offering this as a service if there is any intrest. It would not be cheap, but it turns a rare keyboard into a one of a kind legendary Deck.
I could spend a few paragraphs explaining why mechanical keyboards are far superior to regular cheap keyboards, or why the decks are amazing, but there is already a great explanation of it on overclock.net
The keyboard is very easy to open, and their warranty covers modding! There are 11 screws on the back and then the 2 shells just pop off the PCB and support brace. Once the keyboard is opened you see this:
Thats 105 mechanical key switches and 109 leds. Every single key and led combination needs to be removed in order to access the resistors on the PCB below the aluminum support brace which makes the keyboard extremely rigid. You could easily use this keyboard as a weapon hehe...
Now for a bit of math.
There are 105 switches that need to be removed and 106 LED's. That means there are 422 solder joints that need to be desoldered to remove the brace. This would take hours with braid or a manual solder sucker. Thats why they make these:
It is a hakko 808 desoldering gun. With a tool like this you can desolder the entire keyboard in about half an hour.
Top row removed:
Now normally you would have to follow the traces to find which resistors you need to switch but, Deck provides you with a PCB schematic that makes life much easier. The next step is to remove the existing SMD resistors for the keys you want to switch and replace them with the correct value. Note: The red and yellow decks use a different method of powering the LED's (in pairs with 1 resistor per pair), to run more than one color you have to switch the entire keyboard to the blue, green, and white method.
I found that 560ohm resistors worked best for my replacement 1.8v 20mah 3mm led's. It allows the red to be brighter than the blue at lower brightness settings and the same brightness at higher settings. The keyboard has 6 different brightness settings so you don't blind yourself with the keyboard. I was unable to locate SMD resistors at my local electronics store so I used some 1/8w resistors instead. Slightly harder to solder but not any worse than the SMD ones.
Once I soldered in all of the replacement resistors it was time to reassemble.
The tricky part of reassembly is holding in each individual LED as it gets soldered into place. Simply bending the legs does not provide enough support to solder them in facing straight up. This was easily the most time consuming part of the project.
Then it was testing time. Apologies for the blurry picture, I will need to find my tripod to take lit pictures. Two of the LED's were soldered in with reversed polarity so I had to switch them back (right ctrl and enter).
It is hard to photograph the keyboard in the daytime these two pics are the best I could do.
(Low exposure time to simulate darker enviroment)
I will have some actual night time pictures of it tonight. Like most lighting mods it does not photograph well.
I have been thinking of offering this as a service if there is any intrest. It would not be cheap, but it turns a rare keyboard into a one of a kind legendary Deck.
