So recently I’ve been having more wrist pain typing on my keyboards and figured it was time to actually get a real ergonomic keyboard. After hearing good things from LTT and from the Primeagen… I ended up purchasing a Kinesis Advantage2 on eBay for around $220.
When the keyboard arrived I realized I had made a huge mistake.
I bought the LF version which was with Cherry Red switches. Now this may sound extreme but I HATE linear switches with a passion. So I had to change them. I opened up the Kinesis and started trying to figure out how I would go about changing the switches.
I took out one row of switches and put in some Gateron Baby Kangaroos that I had lying around. And nothing worked. At this point I sort of lost it because I had spent so much money only to break it in hours.
After taking a break I had a hunch that those weird extra holes on the keyboard were the culprit. Turns out that the included switches come with diodes in them. Most switches now-a-days do not come with diodes on them, which explains why I they didn’t work in the Kinesis. So I went to work harvesting the diodes out of the reds and putting them on the backside of the PCB.
One thing I forgot to mention is that in my impatience of removing a diode and switch combo from the board I accidentally pulled out a pad and trace going from the diode to the switch. My solution? Just skip the trace and make the diode the trace. After finishing the entire right side I started having really weird spastic behavior when the keyboard was plugged in for a while.
Turns out that when you apply to much heat to a diode (e.g. like when I was desoldering the bent leads) they can fail and no longer act like a diode and instead act more like a resistor which is no good for a keyboard matrix as described in this great blog post I found.
Simple solution (which to be honest I should have done from the start): just buy some. So I went to my local electronics shop and bought around 35 more diodes to finish up the project. From then on it was smooth sailing.
I will note that if any one else wants to buy a Kinesis Advantage2 from eBay I would not recommend using hot water to clean the keycaps as those completely destroyed the legends on the ABS keycaps used on the Advantage2. I ordered some new blanks from Kinesis directly and am waiting on those arriving as I am writing this.
One of the future mods I’m considering doing is adding some sound deadening to the case as this thing sounds quite hollow like an office keyboard. The other is replacing the included USB cable with a USB-C port so that I can replace the cable with one that can be as long I need it.