Hypercube² Part II

MODDING: KEYBOARD


After the mouse I shifted my attention to the keyboard. To stay in the white theme, I needed a nice white keyboard, and who else other than Apple sells these magnificently designed keyboards? I had to have one. I went out to the Apple store and came home with this :-) . I plugged it in a PC and wonder oh wonder: it works. Even the Apple key works like the windows key! Maybe next time I will try the bluetooth version, altough the guy in the store said it wouldn\'t work. But hey, he said this one wasn\'t gonna work either ;-)




I just love the design of this keyboard - it\'s almost to nice to mod. Well, I said ALMOST... ;-) Apologies to Steve Jobs and all the Mac fanboys, but actually, I don\'t want to do that much to the keyboard - the only thing it is missing is some lighting, of course.




The idea I have is to light up the plexi bottom and the edges. Everyone is lighting up their keys but I want something different. After opening it up I found only one good place where I can mount some LEDs. On the 4th picture inside that little gap where the controller of the keyboard is located. It is going to be very tight , but I think I can manage it.



I installed fifteen LEDs with resistors - they are all wired up on an extra USB port (5V) in the keyboard. It got pretty tight, but at the end I managed to close the keyboard back up.



Testing the LEDs: the idea of lighting up the plexi cover around the keyboard works :-) Just what I was looking for. Maybe in the future Apple will take this idea, just remember I was first :-)



This is what it looks like underneath: the effect of the white LEDs with the white back is more then I expected.


And now for the pimp shots...