No-stabs FRL1800-ish with the half-height clicky switches is done. This one came together fairly quickly, and in general I’m pleased with it. The biggest oopsie was in being too ambitious with the thinness I could achieve, which in the end actually cost me a millimeter or two of thickness because instead of an inset bottom plate, I had to gin up a slim but non-zero bottom case. ZMK is again proving very easy to work with, though I forgot to update the keycodes to include an unlock key for Studio, so I’ll eventually have to flash it again.
The typing feel on these mid-height switches is very interesting. They’ve come up a couple of times on Keebtalk. To refresh memories, they’re normal MX switches on the bottom, but the tops are vertically shrunk down. For these blues, there is no room for a click jacket, so they use a mechanism that looks like nothing so much as a ball catch mechanism for cabinet doors (or keyboard cases, LOL). There is a horseshoe shaped spring in the bottom housing, and a ovoid protrusion in the slider. As the slider goes down it expands the horseshoe, which eventually snaps back and taps the plastic to make the sound. It feels out of time in the sense that it’s so obviously not a clickjacket or clickbar. It just seems like you’ve stumbled on some sort of lesser-known vintage clicky, although I can imagine it might be somewhat reminiscent of Space Invaders.
I’m pretty happy to have a board with them around, and with the main challenge for this type of switch being stabilizers, my no-stabs tendencies are a good fit. I really don’t enjoy the SMD pads on the little USB port I used, and the part that goes to the MCU just didn’t seem to like me, but I was able to solder that end to some test pads on the Pi Pico, and I do like the cleaner USB port you end up with, versus mounting the MCU itself somewhere. The pen groove was sized to handle even a fairly chunky fountain pen, and it does its job while evoking the Silitek IBM membrane boards. I always thought the designs of those boards and the Apple M0487 deserved better than the mush they got.
EDIT: I just fixed the the two transposed caps in the pics. Happy hunting!
