PCB Troubleshooting

Learning and discussion
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I’m trying to troubleshoot my Noxary 280 TKL. I hate to admit it, but Anthony does make a nice keybaord :rofl:

I’ve put this off for some time because I have plenty of keyboards and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I first built my Noxary 280 about 2 years ago. It’s one of the best typing experiences I’ve ever managed to create. Built with pre-retooled cherry blacks. All was great after the build. I probably used the board for about a month or so.

As is my habit, I then move on to other projects that take up my attention and deskspace.

About a year ago, I pulled out the 280 and realized that it was missing keystrokes intermittently. At first it was the ‘s’ and the ‘p’. I figured it was a cold solder joint or something. So I reflowed the joints. Seemed to work! All was good. Then the next day I’m typing and other keys randomly don’t respond. It happens all across the board. You could do a typing test and have no issues, and then you could miss every other word because of missed keystrokes.

I am perplexed. There’s no way all these switches have issues. And there’s no way it’s bad solder or soemthing because I’ve soldered 100s of boards and they aren’t messing up. (Believe me, in a panic that somehow all of my old keybaords were ruined, I got them all out and started type testing. No issues with anything else)

It was almost like the longer I typed on it, the better the issue got. Like pressing a switch 10 times would make it activate on the 10th press and then it didn’t ever mess up again.

I have a hiney PCB that should fit in the case, but I would like to figure out what’s going on.

Any ideas? There’s no damage to the PCB or controller, I’ve checked that.

Ton of cold solder joints (that don’t appear cold)? Some kind of corrosion from storage? Bad controller? Bad diodes?

I’m leaning towards a bad controller just because of how sporadic and hard to replicate the problems are.

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I know you don’t believe it’s the switches, but I’ve had the exact same thing happen and it was the switches. The board had been in a dustier environment which may have contributed to their failure or it could have been a bad batch of Gateron Silent Inks, but either way, removed the switches and put new ones in and it’s good as new.

So I wouldn’t discount it being switches right out the gate.

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I’ve moved to desoldering. I’ll test the switches in a hotswap board if they don’t have too much solder left on the legs.

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Everything desoldered. I took switches from the spots that usually acted up the most… “s” “p” “del” and left arrow. These were spots that missed keystrokes fairly often. I put them in a hotswap board and they didn’t have any issues. I pushed them all a few dozen times. Slow and fast. They all responded every time. :person_shrugging:

I’m going to replace the PCB and upgrade the stabilizers. Was using screw-in cherry before, and I’ll be replacing them with TX-ap. Fingers crossed that it’s not the switches :crossed_fingers:

One positive is that I was originally planning to build my hotswap Frog 8k today but didn’t feel like tuning stabilizers. But now I have a set all ready to go from this desoldered board. :rofl:

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