Bringing my old Atom back to life has been a real adventure. My unit was preordered in the spring of 1980 and was delivered late in the summer that same year. The following couple of years it was used basically every day, expanded and experimented with. It was later replaced with an Atari 800 and put in a box. The last time it was used was as a SIO peripheral to my Atari, meaning it has been sitting untouched in that box for 43 years.
Bringing it back to life has meant carefully removing ugly mods to the PCB, replacing corroded IC sockets, those white ones are particularly bad. Fixing ugly holes in the enclosure and generally just cleaning and polishing stuff up.
But, no matter how much i tried to get the keyboard working there were some keys that just would not work and a few more that reliably always created multiple characters each time they were pressed. As a final measure I tried to remove the keyboard assembly (Issue 3 keyboard, if you know you know) and clean the spring contacts. Lets just say that I have had better ideas in my life![:lol:]( "Laughing")
After looking for some more information I found a thread by Ken Lowe describing his adventures with Atom keyboards. Inspired I set out to create my own version of this and ended up with this:The keys used for this replacement keyboard are Nuphy low profile switches from this series: https://nuphy.com/collections/switches/ ... 59e0&_ss=c but I have also bought some linear non clicky versions to try out. On the first keyboard I installed the blue switches with the highest operating force, which was probably lucky as the acorn atom key tops are relatively heavier than the intended key tops for those switches. I will build a couple of more keyboards and see how they feel.
The 8255 have been broken out on an adapter board and the signals related to the keyboard are transported via a flex cable to the new keyboard PCB. The associated 7445 device has also been moved to the keyboard PCB to reduce the number of wires needed. A simple 20 pin flex cable is now used to connect the keyboard.
A separate key stem that connects the key top to the switch has also been printed using an ABS like SLS material.
All of this have now transformed the computer to something that I can enjoy programming and playing with again.
Bringing it back to life has meant carefully removing ugly mods to the PCB, replacing corroded IC sockets, those white ones are particularly bad. Fixing ugly holes in the enclosure and generally just cleaning and polishing stuff up.
But, no matter how much i tried to get the keyboard working there were some keys that just would not work and a few more that reliably always created multiple characters each time they were pressed. As a final measure I tried to remove the keyboard assembly (Issue 3 keyboard, if you know you know) and clean the spring contacts. Lets just say that I have had better ideas in my life
After looking for some more information I found a thread by Ken Lowe describing his adventures with Atom keyboards. Inspired I set out to create my own version of this and ended up with this:The keys used for this replacement keyboard are Nuphy low profile switches from this series: https://nuphy.com/collections/switches/ ... 59e0&_ss=c but I have also bought some linear non clicky versions to try out. On the first keyboard I installed the blue switches with the highest operating force, which was probably lucky as the acorn atom key tops are relatively heavier than the intended key tops for those switches. I will build a couple of more keyboards and see how they feel.
The 8255 have been broken out on an adapter board and the signals related to the keyboard are transported via a flex cable to the new keyboard PCB. The associated 7445 device has also been moved to the keyboard PCB to reduce the number of wires needed. A simple 20 pin flex cable is now used to connect the keyboard.
A separate key stem that connects the key top to the switch has also been printed using an ABS like SLS material.
All of this have now transformed the computer to something that I can enjoy programming and playing with again.
Statistics: Posted by PacMan — Tue Jun 24, 2025 10:14 pm