Hey, I have a build log I wanted to share. A week or two ago @norbauer posted a chrome plated norbaforce, and I was sitting there and happened to refresh the page right when he posted it. I saw the board, and I had a vision. A vision of true beauty. A vision of the coolest norbaforce ever. A vision of true bling. Today I am here to bring that vision to life (well I mostly did, we’ll get there).
So that’s the board. It’s shiny, and it’s awesome. Let’s start with the donor board. I have been wanting to do a project with a realforce RGB for a while, so that’s what I went with. It’s got lights and it’s pretty and it probably doesn’t sound as good as a not-RGB realforce. I forgot to take a picture before I started taking it apart, but it’s a realforce RGB, you can go find a bunch of pictures online. We ain’t here to see that, we’re here to see the bling. One thing I do like on the realforce boards is the accent they add around the cluster of keys in the top right that no one uses.
The one on the R2 PFU limited I had was fake carbon fiber, and while it was kinda cheesy, the dark color was a nice accent. The thing on this one has sparkles in it, it’s actually a really nice effect, I like it a lot. The realforce stock cases ain’t half bad imo. But they don’t have bling.
Case off, keycaps off. It’s a realforce. No one buys a realforce RGB to use the stock caps. It’s a scientific fact. They’re… fine… But the sliders take MX stems. That’s the point. I’m going to put the stock caps in a plastic bag under my bed in case I decide to sell it someday or something.
The PCB on this is nice. It looks well designed. Here’s some random thoughts from me the electrical engineer.
The MCU says ‘SPANSION’ on it, I had to look it up. Spansion was a joint venture of Fujitsu and AMD that was spun out as it’s own company, bought out an IC design group from Fujitsu, and eventually merged with Cypress in 2014. I dunno why it still says Spansion on it, but that doesn’t surprise me that much. It seems like Fujitsu and Topre have some kind of relationship, so maybe there’s history? I didn’t see a good reason quickly why this MCU in specific would be desirable, it’s like a pretty generic looking arm MCU.
Another interesting thing I saw were the Omron chips scattered through the board. I had a suspicion what it was, and looking it up I was correct; these are LED controllers. One thing that struck me was that this is probably like a $3 IC, and there are several of them. That’s an expensive chip. This ain’t a cheap board. This LED controller is also end of life. I wonder what the volume on this keyboard is. Maybe they just bought up the rest of the stock of them.
So the next step is to take out the like 100 screws and lube this bad boy up and put in the deskeys rings I have been wanting to try, right? Wrong!! I took out two screws and one was starting to strip 
I couldn’t get it out and don’t want to drill it if I don’t have to. That makes lubing a project for another day because I’m tired and don’t want to deal with this tonight.
So what’s next? We throw this boy into the bling!
The case is shiny, look, you can see my phone!
It’s a Norbaurer case, it fits good.
So now it’s in the case. Where do we go from here? Keycaps! Remember my vision of bling? This is where we get there! I bought some super cheap gold caps, because gold and silver match, right?
Wow that’s a lot of bling. But we forgot something
oh yeah this is a realforce RGB!
The keycaps shine through!! I didn’t even realize that when I got them. Is there a more bling, more swag realforce out there? I doubt it. Don’t worry, when we can have meetups again I’ll bring it.
So how does it type? Surprisingly not bad. Realforces feel nice. People like them because they feel nice. I like it because it feels nice. It’s a lil rattly, and very clacky. I bet that with some lube and the deskeys rings it would feel and sound a lot better, but I think that’s a project for another weekend. It’s still nice. The keycaps are… interesting. They are very smooth, almost slimy feeling. I saw a picture on reddit where they looked like shit over time and that the gold wears off. I totally believe that will happen, they are plastic with the gold plated on or something. They feel very cheap. I bet it would sound better with better caps, but that’s not a sacrifice I’m willing to make right now. Maybe someday nice quality shiny gold keycaps will come out. But hopefully not real gold, I def couldn’t afford that.