deskthority

After the beige/ergoclears mod http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?1735 ... ge+edition

I decided to experiment a little with retroillumination.

My idea was to have a yellow backlight with orange modifiers.


BTW the yellow led I get were more amber than yellow, and were also not to good on beam shape.

So the end result was not too good



So I decided for the plan B, which involves the warm white LEDs.

Again I intended to use warm white for alphabets and cold white for modifiers, unluckily the cold white I got had a slightly different VF so to mix them with warm was impossible w/o cutting and pasting PCB lines (and I'm too lazy to do it).

At the end blue and golden leds were used and the final result is really nice IMHO.

The images are crappy photos but you should get the idea.





I used the color scheme present on model m, but maybe I'll do some further variations.

Warm leds i got are very cheap (less than 10 euro for 100) but very good, they are even, with a good beam shape, and they can be mixed with blue, green and acqua leds w/o the need of separate lines and resistors.

I really like what you have in the last two.

Thanks.

And consider that the photos are just an approximation of the real effect

Nice! I like the amber glow. I have some ancient HP Terminal board with similar amber LEDs. So much nicer than the generic green on most old boards.

sixty wrote:Nice! I like the amber glow. I have some ancient HP Terminal board with similar amber LEDs. So much nicer than the generic green on most old boards.

Amber was a higher level choice for the monitor's phosphors also.

I think that those terminal boards had the leds meant to match the monitor color.

New experiment....

How did you make the dual-colour backlit keys on the number row?
I am guessing that you are using either LEDs per key, coloured gel .. or both. And how do you avoid colour bleed?

How did you make the dual-colour backlit keys on the number row?

Indeed the nice part of this mod is this one.

The keyboard has most of the leds untouched from the second version I posted.

I made some experiments with gel and the results were so so.

Then I used simply a M sized steadler lumocolor pen I had on my desk. I painted both the warm white leds surface and the underside of the keycaps.

The paint is both very resistant and also very easy to remove (just use alcohol).

The green is made with a clone pen and is not as good as red.

But a box of 8 lumocolor pens is already on its way.

http://www.staedtler.it/Lumocolor_perma ... .Staedtler

When they reach my home I'll go further, improving the color combination.

the dual color keycaps are made exactly as the single color i just painted the led surface and the corresponding keycap underside half red and half green.

That was the main reason to use warm white leds