What does the inside of a Apple Wireless Keyboard look like?

January 2, 2006 1:47 PM

What does the inside of an Apple Wireless Keyboard look like? Specifically, I'm interested in the active electronic part of it. A picture would be great, but not required.

I've tried googling nearly every combination of apple wireless bluetooth keyboard internals guts pcb disassembly that I can find, with no avail! Bonus points if you know if you can toggle the Caps Lock light through software!

posted by adamwolf to technology (10 comments total)

i have one of these but i dont think i want to take it apart right now... what are you looking for, in particular?

as for the caps lock key, you might check out the kernel extension that can swap caps lock and control on 10.3, so that the keyboard can Function As God Intended. its called uControl and i think it was obsoleted by 10.4, which has built-in support for keycode swapping. there might be some code in that driver dealing with the caps lock light.

the capslock key on apple keyboards is somewhat special and its a minor miracle that this guy got it working at all.
posted by joeblough at 2:35 PM on January 2, 2006

the capslock key on apple keyboards is somewhat special and its a minor miracle that this guy got it working at all.
posted by joeblough at 2:35 PM PST on January 2 [!]

Sorry to digress, but why?
posted by cellphone at 2:57 PM on January 2, 2006

In particular, I'm wondering if the keyboard is built like other keyboards I've disassembled, with a number of traces which connect to a pcb through a small number of inputs. I realize that the keyboard will also have to deal with bluetooth, but hopefully it still looks something like this:

http://martybugs.net/electronics/images/leds_keyboard3.jpg

Knowing the dimensions of this pcb would be great, assuming there is a single, smallish pcb to measure in the first place.

Please don't break your keyboard answering this question for me, Mefites!
posted by adamwolf at 3:01 PM on January 2, 2006

No luck in finding anything for you, but the search did make my day anyway.
posted by nathan_teske at 3:31 PM on January 2, 2006

the stupid caps lock key does not send key-up events like every other key, just key-down events. but it turns out that some other event is generated, and so if you track the state of the key and remember that you saw a key-down for caps lock, then you can infer that it was released from the other event.

having said all that, it might only be true for all the powerbook keyboards.

i solved this problem by buying sun "unix" USB keyboards for all my macs... the control key is in the right place.

adamwolf, for me that link just redirects to microsoft.com. anyway i know what you are talking about. i assume this keyboard is no different.
posted by joeblough at 3:49 PM on January 2, 2006

okay, i took the back off. i didnt want to tear it apart any more than necessary but it seems to look like you imagined.


posted by joeblough at 4:00 PM on January 2, 2006

Joeblough, that's awesome. By any chance could you measure to see how long the spacebar is on that keyboard?
posted by adamwolf at 4:09 PM on January 2, 2006

its about 4.75". sorry i didnt measure the board, i didnt read your question carefully enough.
posted by joeblough at 8:29 PM on January 2, 2006

Not a problem. That's definitely exactly what I wanted to see. A few seconds in the GIMP and I've got the dimensions I wanted, but I just needed to know if it looked like your image shows.

Thanks a million.
posted by adamwolf at 8:47 PM on January 2, 2006

I've taken the whole thing apart, if you have any other questions, like "Should I have a handy tray nearby in which to hold 100 rubber nipples, just in case, you know, the keyboard is full of them and they burst out like spider eggs?"
posted by odinsdream at 6:38 AM on January 3, 2006