Bleugh.Biz

Guess what!

Is a 50% scale Commodore 64c a Commodore 32c, a Commodore 16c or even a C6.4?

More progress!
These Release Candidate 2 boards are nigh on perfect.
They’ve allowed me to tweak resistor settings and shift lock functionality.
I just need to print more keycaps to tweak the colour and these will be finished!
The first small batch ready to go.

Now I gotta setup some type of shop, figure out just how much these cost me to make so I can put a price on them!

I already know they’ll be a good bit cheaper than my previous fully soldered versions!

That one at the bottom right is how you will receive your keybaord!

You’ll either loop a USB out of your mini then into a port,
Or you’ll be able to solder it with 4 wires directly to your mini PCB for an invisible install!

Either way, this kit will be significantly more user friendly than my last one 🙂

Here’s to a 2026 release!

Doesn’t look much!
But, it’s now complete!
The C64 mini surface mount keyboard project has pretty much wrapped.

This particular unit’s headed out as a gift, it HAD to be perfect!

After playing with a test keyboard circuit board connected up to a mini for a few months, I found a few small bugs in the software, and a mild annoyance with the hardware, There’s only one small change that I’ll be making to the production keyboard PCB

Left shift / shiftlock.
On a REAL c64, (and my previous keyboard) shiftlock latches and is tied to left shift!
(Shiftlock really just holds down left shift)

On this new surface mount keyboard, I can’t do that,
So, next best thing is to have shiftlock as its own dedicated key.

This keeps left shift isolated and gives the ability in software to ‘toggle’ shiftlock on and off.

I’m hoping to maybe add an LED status to show this, kinda like the caps lock light on modern PC keyboards…

As for the ‘few bugs’ …I recon I’ve captured all but one of the genuine C64 keyboard behaviours!
Yep, holding SHIFT, CTRL, or even C= and a key will do exactly what it did on an original!

There’s two exceptions! Commodore key and

Getting there…..

And today we have,
Hot Chocolate - Commodore 64 mini keycap style and some knitted elephants!

Did you hear the one about the Mini Amiga 500 with the plastic non working keyboard?

Well, i went done made one with a
Mini WORKING Keyboard!

Many of you’ll know just how many years (on and off) have gone into this, multiple thousands of hours developing and iterating.
Measuring the originals!
Profiling the original keys
Creating the keys in CAD
Creating the text in CAD then revising for 42-ish percent scale.
Sourcing the key switches
Developing a working solution to use keycaps with the switches
Finding how to custom colour resin,
Perfecting the print.
Assembly!
Code!

Still to finish the last few yards now, packaging and pricing!
Ive got now weeks of spreadsheets , price breaks, sourcing ahead of me!

The top one represents about two months of work to improve things compared to the bottom.

The left hand print is from yesterday. The right hand one a few weeks ago!

Things, admittedly look very similar!
But, i can assure you, theres close to a thousand tweaks to the keycap CAD model.

That last 10% to perfect things takes easily 90% of the time!

The light keycaps are now DONE!
Next step , the darker ones 🙂 (which is just pigment matching)

Tiny, incremental fixes!
Here, I’m breaking stuff to see how tolerant it is.
My new resin and print setup have really tightend tolerances and made things sharper.
Too sharp it seems and now the buttons fit too perfectly.
So, another couple of tweaks needed to stop them sticking!