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Fixing Keyboards The Hard Way

When I was in college, I rented a house a few miles away from campus with a few other students. Each of us shared a few traits in common. We were all extremely messy, extremely nerdy and extremely cheap. In more than one situation, these three traits found themselves working in tandem to achieve a purpose that enriched our experience of living together. One such experience was the makeshift solution to the hole in our roof that our landlord never fixed, another was

Rather than buying a new keyboard for his computer, my roommate removed each individual key from his keyboard, placed them in a box so that he wouldn’t mix up their order and then removed the circuitry from the plastic shell. He ordered replacement circuitry for what must have been, after shipping, more than the cost of a new keyboard, reinstalled the new circuitry, affixed the keys and went about typing with his “new” keyboard. Arguably, the most tedious part of this process was the removal of each key from the keyboard. This is a problem that besets keyboards but not membrane switches. A membrane switch manufacturer could replace a malfunctioning membrane switch by simply removing the overlay, identifying the malfunctioning part, replace it, replace the membrane and then return the product to the customer, no key-sorting necessary. This is one of the principal benefits of membrane switches: there are no collections of discrete keys to worry about. Instead, there are just a few parts, which makes management and repair of membrane switches comparatively easy.