I’m looking for a thin custom cable for my NCR-80.
Bonus points if it’s affordable.
My stock NCR-80 cable keeps getting knotted up. So I’m looking for something that will retain its shape.
Thick cables are less desirable, since they take up more space. But a modest cable, say in beige + cream, about 1.5 - 2 m long would be fine.
How thick are you talking about here? USB A-to-C or C-to-C?
You mention it’s getting knotted up – I’m assuming it’s pretty flexible and probably silicone coated (like the cables that come with the NK Classic TKL?)? That may have less to do with the diameter and more to do with the flexibility of the cable. PVC coated cables tend to be WAY less flexible in my experience and might work for what you’re doing, but not sure. (Nylon/fabric coated ones are hard to tell as it’s more of a sheath that goes around the regular jacket, so they can go either way.)
Though really, the flexibility has more to do with the number of strands in the wires in the cable and less to do with the jacket. But in order to use that flexibility, the jacket also needs to be flexible, so that’s why I assume they go together typically. Less flexible cables tend to have 7-9 wires, while the super-flexible silicone wire will have more like 30+ wires.
For keyboards, you can get away with a LOT of stuff that would be a problem for higher speed/throughput applications. For short runs, you can go without shielding and even wire twisting – I’ve done 10-30cm runs of DIY’ed 4 wire ribbon cable with my own plugs soldered on to great success. This means that while I’d normally say to stay away from things like “flat” USB cables (because they don’t twist the data pair to reduce interference), for this application they’d probably work fine.
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Haha, okay. By ‘thin’ I just meant that the cable doesn’t have to be as thick as some of those luxury inch-thick bungee-cords you see some people selling.
The stock silvery-colour cable for the NCR-80 R1 is actually interesting. It feels like some kind of fabric/felt/woven nylon on the outside, and it’s about a half-CM thick. Pretty thin by custom keyboard standards.
Unlike many of the custom cords that are advertized as being tangle-resistant, the stock one gets knotted and tangled like a garden hose. It’s not coiled or springy like the ones that un-tangle on their own.
So I’m just looking for a reasonable 1.5-3m keyboard cable that doesn’t tangle. Since my NCR-80 uses beige + cream CRP, I thought it would also be good if the cable was beige, with cream ends/connectors, maybe the USB-A could be teal like the arrow-keys.
Yes, it would be a standard USB-A to USB-C cable. There’s no lighting on the board save for lock indicators.
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Gotcha! And yeah, the “custom” cable that are thick as AC power cables are ridiculous.
IMO, you’d probably be fine with ye old cheap USB A-to-C cable. I emphasize the cheap b/c that will likely net a cable that isn’t as flexible and so less likely to entangle. Beige should be easy but the teal A end might have to be a DIY paint job.
Alternatively, seems like a thing you could custom commission, but absolutely no clue who does that in the community these days with all the shops closing.
Fabric sheathing is something that you can add later, as IIRC it’s just heat shrunk on to the outside.
There’s also the complete DIY route but you might not be up for that. I’ve found it most useful for when I need a cable that has very particular, usually small dimensions, but especially for things like 90deg or 180deg turns – the later I do by soldering the wires on a connector backward, and just coating the end in silicone glue to protect it. My usual vendor for parts for this sort of thing is Adafruit, as they have quite a few different DIY USB parts in stock. For short runs, I just use ribbon cable, while for longer runs I usually just hack off the ends of an existing USB cable I don’t need (so it has proper shielding and data pair twisting).
An example of where I’ve used this in keyboards is taking an existing board that has a PCB-mounted USB-C jack and using a flat, right angled connector to re-run that USB either to a centered position (normally done with a daughterboard) or in one case to add a complete USB hub to the board.
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I agree. A cheap solution should work.
I ordered a keyboard cable from AliExpress that sort of has the right colour. I think I might be able to combine it with another cheap cable, and it will match.
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