Unicomp has announced that all their keyboards will replace the famous “buckling spring” switches, with new, so called “suckling spring” switches.

Unicomp has announced a silly new keyboard, that will use so called "chuckling spring" switches.

Unicomp has announced that all their keyboards will replace the famous “buckling spring” switches, with new, so called “suckling spring” switches.

Some backstory: I was traveling a few weeks ago, but needed to do some recording for work. Normally I use a Tascam for that, but there weren’t any in stock at Microcenter so I got some similar-looking model instead.

Being a smart girl [citation needed] I did figure that I was going to be in for some Audio Hardware Bullshit so I made sure to have a USB Mini cable, because that is a standard that in the year of our lord 2023++ is used exclusively by audio hardware and mechanical keyboard manufacturers.

Surprise! It connects over USB Micro, somehow! Weird!

(Don’t worry! It did come with some Audio Hardware Bullshit in refusing to accept an SD card bigger than 32GB, so I had to buy a new card, too, rather than use one I had around already. But that’s fine)

Anyway.

I mentioned replacing my V60 keyboard, which finally died. I did not say how it finally died, though. I had been compelled to repair a few traces over the years, but eventually the USB Mini port pulled away from the PCB. I was able to resolder it successfully once, but not a second time.

With that keyboard deceased, I no longer have a need for USB Mini cables. I am really not sure why the connector survived as long as it did. It does not seem to have been meaningfully more robust than USB Micro, just more awkward to use and less ubiquitous. They’re still tiny little SMD components that are fucking impossible to fix or replace if you’re an idiot like me.

Matias, my keyboard supplier of choice, has used USB Micro connectors on their keyboards for as long as I’ve been using them, which is ten years by this point. By then, they were also common on smartphones.

But they’ve soldiered on in niche applications well after the connector became obsolete everywhere else, and I’ll admit I’m not entirely certain why that is. Maybe there’s inertia, in that if you have a bunch of audio hardware that connects over USB instead of Firewire, you already have the cables, sooooo…

Given the other place I’ve encountered them, “even more niche mechanical keyboards,” I kind of wonder if there was also just a glut of the sockets available and that’s inventory that has been gradually used up and now maybe, at last, everybody will go to USB-C or whatever new monstrosity the consortium is cooking up.

But that’s not the point of this post :3

The point of this post is that between the time I last bought a Unicomp keyboard, during the Bush administration, and today they have introduced a smaller keyboard. That’s good. I don’t need a full-sized keyboard, and also if I have one complaint about Unicomp it’s that their keyboards are very heavy, because they have literal steel plates in them.

I generally prefer the feeling of Alps switches over buckling springs, but buckling springs are a close second and my Unicomp was dead so I figured: what the hell. And it arrived yesterday, just before I had to leave for CES, and I discovered that it has a detachable cable!

And: it is not USB Mini!

And: it is not USB Micro!

No, for reasons that genuinely escape me, Unicomp decided to furnish their keyboard with just, like… a USB-A connector?

If anything this is is more baffling than most of the alternatives. It does mean that if the connector ever becomes the point of failure on the keyboard, I’ll

So I had this keyboard for, like, a month before it stopped working. The “Q” key just stopped registering. The first time this happened, I tried blowing it out, and that fixed it for a bit. Now, though, it's stopped again, and didn’t feel like coming back.

This was a Unicomp TKL; I like buckling springs well enough, and my previous Unicomp lasted for a long, long time so I figured this would be okay. I also figured I could disassemble it and take a look.

Nope! :'D

Pulling out the keyboard from the plastic bits is easy, but the core of the keyboard is a curved steel plate which holds in place a three-piece membrane beneath the keys themselves. Those three are bonded together by 20 or 30 little melted plastic standoffs, meaning:

1. Blowing compressed air into the keyboard itself doesn't really do very much, since the membrane is sealed.
2. There is no non-destructive way to access the membrane (for example, if you wanted to clean it) because the only way to do so is to snip the plastic retainers.
3. Also, the membrane is held together (and against the steel plate) by tension, so if you do snip the plastic retainers off, everything comes apart.

That said, I did snip the plastic off, open it up, open up my finger pretty good on the steel plate (thanks guys) and take a look.

(If you do this yourselves, remove every single keycap first, by the way :P The switch is two parts—the cap and a t-shaped bit of plastic with a spring on it. If you leave the caps in, they put enough pressure on the spring to push the plastic out of the socket in which it is held only by vibes.)

I took all the springs out, cleaned the membrane carefully, and put everything back into place. Then I heated some spare PETG from an old 3D printer raft until it melted enough to serve as a replacement for the retaining clips, and reassembled the keyboard.

All told, this process took two hours, and I'm not sure where I could’ve saved much time. The “Q” key works again. The “B” key, however, does not.

I am insufficiently interested in disassembling everything to try again. Upshot of this is: if you like buckling springs, try to find an IBM original, I guess, or maybe an older Unicomp (I haven’t tried taking one of those apart). The internals of their mini TKL are both not user serviceable and extremely cheap to a degree that is, frankly, extremely frustrating.

Like, in general I prefer Alps (Matias switches) to buckling springs anyway. Matias has historically had the disadvantages that their switches are, for whatever reason, very prone to chattering. But disassembling the keyboards are easy, the switches aren't that hard to come by, and when a switch goes bad I can replace it in a couple minutes and then it’s fine for...

...Possibly indefinitely? I track all my replacements on a spreadsheet, and I don’t think I’ve had to replace a switch twice.

So, I dunno. Matias’s QC leaves a lot to be desired and it’s hard for me to recommend them to other people. But I would recommend them in a heartbeat over whatever the hell Unicomp decided they could produce and sell in this case.

Absolutely unacceptable.

Not just because it failed almost immediately, but also because it’s built with the kind of craftsmanship I’d expect from a 3* Amazon dropship knockoff called “Geelfan Mechanical Keyboard Detachable Cable Lighted Fun RGB USB Switch Switches Wired Keyboard Gaming Keyboard for Windows Mac Steamdeck Steam” instead of a company that pretends to be the successor to the Model M.

Not that I’m bitter :P

It's louder than all hell and takes up half my desk, but it feels incredible. Made with the original tooling, moulds, etc. by ex-IBM and Lexmark employees. I don't even want to type fast, man, I wanna slow cruise this Caddie around the block. It's like all my fingertips are playing God Hand.