Wearable Tech: Keyboard

Alright, so a few days ago we were given our brief and yesterday we began working on our new project. Most people were really stumped, but I think we can figure this out. You can still have a limited amount of team work on this to get some help and advice even though it's an individual project, maybe even inspiration. Give whoever helped you some credit of course. One thing I learnt from this is the you don't have to do anything alone, there's plenty of help out there. All you need to do is look.

With my old keyboard, I couldn't use it with my project because the PS2 connector it had was faulty as one of the little pins got bent and broke off. So instead I practiced soldering on it so that I can get it right for the real chip I'm using.


This is what my soldering looked like after bumping and banging into things on my way home. Not bad for my first go at soldering, though there is room for improvement. Some of the soldering was really good, but there were some that were really bad as well. I know that one came off on the way.


For example this one on the left is fraying and looks ready to come off too. Will need to practice soldering some more and it will probably help too to strengthen the soldering with hot glue.


Today I worked on this chip with my iron willpower and determination for over 10 hours only to find that it was all for nothing. After carefully scraping off the carbon, it refused to type anything at all for me in a word document. For some reason the flow of electricity to the terminals was broken. It's probably because the bright green lines may have been broken while I was removing the carbon. So I got another keyboard. This time I tried it out on a word document first before scraping off the carbon, but still it refused to type even though I hadn't done anything to it yet.

That's fine, I will now have two more chips to practice soldering on D: But I will have to find out what sort of problem this is. I've asked around on facebook and asked Dexter, who had the same keyboard as me if he had any problems with his chip.


What I learnt from this experience is that if you've worked on something for over 5 hours straight, don't....just DON'T do it. Know when to walk away and have a break from the project to think over why something isn't working. Forcing your way through the problem probably won't work because you're hoping it would work but not thinking of a practical solution to the problem. If there's a problem, walk away, ask around, think, and come back later.





EDIT (18/4/2011):
FANTASTIC!! It turns out there's absolutely no problem with my chip after all. It was my USB ports on my home computer that were being faulty because my tablet and mouse were conflicting against each other making the ports malfunction when both of them are plugged in. So I will do this project on my mac instead so that I won't need to worry about faulty USB ports. I got another keyboard chip for this anyway in case my soldering fails though. However, I don't want to begin soldering until I have a clear idea of what I'm doing. I'll have a basic design first, and build on that while getting my wires and keys sorted.