20220831 TG3 Medical - jsheradin/kb_adventures GitHub Wiki

This board has seen a lot of sunlight. It's made by the same no-nonsense company as the cop car board a few months back. It features dye sublimated PBT caps and Cherry MX black switches. The legends are pretty unique since this board was part of a spectroscopy system. Fortunately the protocol is standard PS/2 so it's pretty easy to get working with a Soarer's converter. The keys are handled a bit strangely though. All of the special keys along the top are sent as key combinations. They all correspond to either F9 or F10 with a letter, the function key always comes first. Soarer's can handle this just fine by defining F9 and F10 as momentary layer shifts. Within those layers you can define each letter as whatever you want the key to do.

Having evidently been stored outside, this board was completely packed with dirt and had the legends nearly bleached off. It saw so much sunlight that the anodizing on the aluminum plate started to fade. Fortunately it must have been a dry climate since there was minimal corrosion. Everything cleaned up nicely with the few rusty parts getting some evaporust treatment. The yellowed bits were given a soak in the sous-vide-retrobrighter. I decided to try out a one of the hyped modern Cherry clone switches and threw in a set of Gateron Oil Kings, a pre-lubed linear switch. The board went back together smoothly with a quick 3D printed mount made up for the internal Soarer's converter running on a Teensy 2.0.

I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of the switches after using them for a while. If I lubed a set of switches by hand and they felt like this I would be kicking myself for using way too much lube. They're objectively smooth and everything but they have that viscous waxy feeling of being over-lubed. I'd take a clean set of vintage MX blacks over these no questions asked.