Kinesis Advantage360 Hot-swappable keyboard

Since I’ve got this keyboard I fell in love with it. This piece of technology is definitely addressing most of my needs as software developer as having very stable and reliable keyboard. I’ve been using laptop keyboard for many, many years. This got me into trouble after years of use - I started to get some back and shoulders pain. No, it is not about posture but just purely about the fact that hand on keyboards are too close to each-other much makes my chest to be mostly closed all the time when I type. That, with many hours of use, leaded to those injuries. That is why i decided to switch to split keybaord. Choice was quite obvious - it shouldn’t be just keyboard that is being split in a half but as well something more ergonomic as much as possible. I bought Kinesis Advantage 360. I decided to got with wired version.

Since beginning I was surprised about the overall quality of plastic, keycaps and switched. I choose Gateron brown switches as something medium level for as my daily driver - not to clicky-clacky nor too soft. After some time of use I noticed that keyboard has been making quite some unwanted noise - I mean the actual keybord box was working like resonance box. That was quite annoying and sounded quite hmmm cheap. Inspired by YoutTube video I decided to upgrade my brown switches and go with Gateron White Pro. Then i discovered that my original switches are… soldered to PCB. Doh! Won’t be easy to replace :-( Then after reading a bit and google I thought to myself - wait a minute - why not making my keyboard hot-swappable then? In that case we need to go for a little shopping then.

To make our little project work we have to purchase

• switches of choice

• a bit a skills when it comes to soldering

• solder

• hot-swappable sockets (make sure that you buy at least 200 of them - we’re going to need 2 of these per 1 switch)

• soldering station (like for instance the one I have)

• following unsoldering gun can be helpful as well

Once we have all the goodies we can start with removing key caps. Next we want to unsolder old switches. You can check following photo where you can see how I removed few switches and left clean soldering points on PCB (those with holes in them).

In the following photo you can see that keyboard PCB is double sided. That means - be really, really carful when unsoldering - do not use brute force. Be patient and make sure that before you‘re going to remove switch those switch pins are not soldered anymore to PCB. Being too nervous and giving too much pressure before the old solder is being removed can lead to damaging PCB paths on one side of the PCB. That is going with 100% centrality make your single key or even entire row to not work anymore! Let the peaceful mind be with you. Ohmmmmmm….

I noticed that sometimes even by cleaning the old soldering PCB hole is a bit too tight for the new hot-swappable socket. WIth this simple tool I maned to fix it.

With proceeding photo you can see that I used old resistor as a little helper which was my tool to put those hot-swappable sockets to those PCB holes. Resistor, as its another fantastic feature, is absorbing heat so you won’t burn your fingers + socket does not fall out and stays still when being soldered to PCB.

You can see in the following photo that some sockets I’ve been soldering are a little bit more or less shallow since PCB itself is very curved. Because of its quite unique shape I’d to manage to figure out how to find the right spot of how deep shall I solder those sockets. In that case once I put socket in I just dropped as well a tiny drop of solder and attached new switch to those new sockets. Next I checked how shallow or deep those sockets would have to be soldered by unsoldering them again and moving them up and down until I found the right spot. Next, I soldered them for good :).

You can see that when I managed to adjust level of sockets and how deep they’re soldered. I was sure that newly attached switch to it will have proper contact with socket and electricity will flow as a thunder.

Another thing to notice is that the switches I bought had those two extra plastic pins. In Advantage 360 PCB there were just no holes for them. In that case I used tool shown in the following photo to…cut them off. Case solved.

Original switch and the one “fixed” by me is shown side by side.

After popping in my new switches - they gently clicked once being attached to plastic cage. Now all the switches being tested I was happy with what I’ve accomplished. You can check this short YouTube clip I prepared to show how easy it is to replace those switches now.

In the end before fully reassembling keyboard I decided to put some foam inside (just below PCB) to make the whole keyboard box less noisy and sound more like a solid piece of plastic. For that task I purchased soft cotton filling that in the end is absorbing unwanted echo and noise super well. It is absolutely optional thing since inside the box there is no so much space left, albeit still IMHO it is worth it! That nice deep milky sound of new switches…