20210112 Geac 8340

A library's worth of these were dumped on eBay for a reasonable price. It features some nice doubleshot ABS caps and HiTek dovetail switches. Evidently there was not much UV stabilizer mixed in with the caps and/or it saw some considerable sunlight over its life.

The board's protocol and matrix scanning is implemented wholly with discrete logic chips. MMcM did a tidy job reverse engineering it and made an open source QMK based converter. Unfortunately the matrix is fundamentally 2KRO with some blocking that would definitely get in the way of modern computer use.

Since the switch grids are PCB mounted, there's no way to non-destructively do a handwired matrix. This meant the obvious path was to design a full replacement PCB. The PCB was kept simple by utilizing a Teensy 2.0 running QMK as the actual controller.

The caps are among the best recovery I've achieved with retrobrigting. They ended up a very nice white-cream color without fading the black legends.