The One Where I Learned About Basic Tool Maintenance

Well, it finally happened.  After desoldering and rebuilding multiple boards, with a couple of bridge wire fixes but nothing insurmountable, I finally killed one. The Keychron K6 RGB is a well built board, and the switches did not want to be removed. Compounding things, after several keyboards’ worth of desoldering, the insides of my Engineer SS-02 were ... grimy. In retrospect, it makes sense that it would need to be cleaned out periodically (though it does spit out those nice shiny hollow tubes of removed solder). Need to pick up some lithium grease to do it right:

  Anyway. All the switches still work, save the “shift key” row; from left shift through the “B” key, the keys don’t respond at all. From N to the end of the row, any keypress (or, using tweezers between the two solder points to simulate a key switch press) spits out all the keys from the entire row. Sounds like it’s probably a diode issue, and probably beyond my current ability to troubleshoot or fix. Maybe not, though. We’ll see. For now I’m trying to see if Keychron will sell me a hotswap PCB and plate from that version of this keyboard.