Bodge, Bodge, Bodge

Published on 2021-11-06 in NHYTGB Keyboard.

Finally the weekend is here, and I had some time to actually program and test this device. Right away I found this tiny little problem on the PCB:

It’s hard to see, but there is a trace between PA01 and PA02 pins. One is part of the key matrix, the other goes to the analog joystick, so this would give us some really interesting effects — fortunately I noticed it, so I could desolder the chip with hot air, cut that trace, and solder it back again.

Next, I had some fun getting the D-pad and the mouse buttons to work. For some reason they were ignored. After about an hour of experimenting, replacing switches, replacing diodes, cutting traces, adding bodges and so on, I finally figured out what is happening. I made two footprints for buttons in there, both SMD and THT, so that I can experiment with different buttons. But I didn’t notice, that the THT buttons I used this time, have some of the contacts sticking out on the sides. Those were making contact with the SMD pads, resulting in the switch always being on. Since the keypad module is event-based, and the switch was on even before the code started, so we never got a keypress event, and obviously it also never was released to generated a key release event, so the key was basically being ignored. To make it more interesting, those contacts are only one one side, so the problem was only present for about half of the buttons — depending how they were rotated. In the end, I just rotated the misbehaving buttons 180° to fix this.