Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Every Wireless Keyboard is a Liar… but the Fix Costs $2”.
This is a wireless keyboard right, that’s what it says on the website and on the box. So then, why does it have a wire hanging off of it? Oh for the battery, you say: oh well, that explains it. No, that explains nothing. It not only fails to eliminate a wire from my desk, it costs more and it needs to be unplugged occasionally in order to keep the battery healthy. Calling this an improvement over a wired keyboard is an outright lie.
The most baffling part is that we live in a world that has Wireless power. Smartphones have had wireless charging for so long that even devices made in North Korea support it. So what is preventing keyboard manufacturers from going true Wireless? Well, as it turns out nothing for the price of this tiny waffle maker, we can quickly and easily turn nearly any wireless keyboard into well and actually wireless keyboard. Why hasn’t this become a standard? What are the pitfalls, and how can we avoid them and what are our different options to turn this keyboard from a lie into a good, honest, peripheral? The answer to all three is, after this message from our sponsor iFixit repair, your own broken devices with iFixit to celebrate their 20th anniversary iFixit is giving out a free T-shirt with purchases of a hundred dollars or more stay tuned or click the link below to score. Some more free swag at iFixit, most Wireless Power Solutions, use electromagnetic induction, which sounds fancy, but the principle is fairly simple.
A moving magnet near a coil of wire will generate an electrical current in the aforementioned wire and, conversely, when an electric current passes through a coil, it generates a magnetic field, so by pulsing electricity through one coil, you can create a pulsing or changing magnetic field so That, when a second coil is placed near it, it will generate an electrical current without a wire. The double conversion means that wireless charging is not particularly efficient, which limits your total power and compared to what you might see in the comic books. Magnetic force is only effective over relatively short distances, but the good news is that the keyboard Community hasn’t taken the Nvidia approach to product design.
Yet, and with only a few exceptions, people keep their keyboards planted fairly firmly on their desks desks that can be equipped with wireless power modules. Of course, we need a way to receive said Wireless power enter this. It cost us less than 15 bucks on Amazon and if we had the patience devices like it, actually this seems to be the exact same.
One can be had for as little as two US Dollars on AliExpress. It’S a 5 watt receiver. That is plenty for our keyboard and inside it we’ll find an oblong coil, a graphite pad to reflect the magnetic field back for a strong connection and a small circuit board.
This one is primarily marketed for old smartphones or those with broken QI charging systems, but in practice it works to charge any 5 volt type c device up to one amp. Other similar coils can do 2, amps or 10 watts and cost just a few dollars more and the upcoming G2 standard claims 15 watts will be the new maximum. I’M ready for toaster keyboard, uh sort of wild.
This all in one sealed up solution is simple: it does present some challenges. What if your keyboard’s charging port is in a place that makes it impractical to slide this underneath it? What, if your cable plugs in right above or beside the feet? And you like typing at an angle or what, if you just hate, having a thin black white? Look: what if you just hate having a thin black wire running down the side of your otherwise Sleek? Perfect mechanical input device, thankfully, there’s no need to settle when you can meddle with a few simple solder joints you can attach there. It is one of these directly to the USB port, while hiding the entire solution neatly inside the case for your keyboard.
It’S the same. Electronics, as that external one, but without the type C connector the thin plastic casing – and oh did – I mention that they are even cheaper. Getting a keyboard open usually involves removing some or should be leaving these in order once all the screws are out. Opening the board should be as simple as popping the clips get in there cool. Oh spoiler movie Magic once you’ve got the board open. It should reveal a small circuit board that the USB port attaches to and if you’re really lucky at this stage, you’ll find test pads that are clearly labeled, usually something like VCC, v-bus or V plus, and that would be for the positive connection.
Sometimes, though, you’ll be left guessing, if you have to guess a multimeter and a type c to USB 2.0 type, a cable that you don’t use anymore will make quick work of things simply violently decapitate the type A end of the cable plug it in prod. The positive pin and then use your other probe to poke at the test pads until you get that sweet sweet beep of continuity. Now, at this stage deciding where to place, the charging coil is going to be very dependent on your keyboard and on your personal preferences. But one thing that you will need to keep in mind when weighing placement options is that you want the distance between your transmitter.
Coil, wherever that will be, and your receiver coil, which will be inside your keyboard, to be as short as possible, if you’re planning to charge your keyboard wirelessly while you use it, which I would strongly recommend, because it’s awesome, it means you never have to think about It again the safest place to put this would be down near the space bar even with the feet of the keyboard up. The wrist area is going to be designed to be as close to the desk as possible once you’ve got your coils new home picked out, and your solder points mapped. You just use some Captain tape to stick it down and solder it all together. You may have to change the wire out by the way out of the box.
It’S not very long but fun Tech tip. If you don’t have any spools of wire kicking around because you don’t do this very often, you can always Harvest some wire from that. Usb cable that you just ruined or from a Cat5e cable, that’s lying around with broken Clips or something like that. Then it should be as simple as putting it all back together and you should have yourself a truly wireless keyboard. Let’S test drive it right now. I just need a way to get power to it.
Ah, yes, this thing very cool uh. How does it? Oh, my God, I have to screw it into the bottom of the table. Yep! That’S correct! Okay! Well, rock! On brother, oh, hey, hey! Whoa! What’S that it’s doing a something I was about to say that I think maybe this wood or whatever just doesn’t something anyway. The point is my phone charges.
So that’s not the problem. Let’S take the keyboard back again. Oh, it’s working, you know what is the keyboard just charged [ Laughter ]? That would explain why it pulses for a second and then it’s like no up because it’s charged, but the next stage is to see if it will work through our Northern Lights desk. Pad of ready come on come on buddy.
Can you do it? I don’t know how to do the trick. Don’T make me look like a fool. We’Ve got it it’s working, okay, we can confirm by restarting it and it should pulse.
I swear to God. This is the right spot. It doesn’t matter The Savvy among you have probably noticed by now that our solution requires the keyboard to be placed pretty precisely for power and some keyboards use a metal chassis. So QI charging wouldn’t be an option for those at all. That’S what they want you to think there is a keyboard with wireless charging built in you can put it pretty much wherever you want on the accompanying desk mat and it’s made of metal.
The angry Mouse cyberboard is built like a 1960s refrigerator, but wait if we look at the bottom. What’S this A Plexiglas window with the charging coil in it crazy right, but so is the price I mean it’s a really cool solution. The pad uses 15 coils to improve placement flexibility, but by the times you’ve got the matching set keyboard and Pad you’ll have spent nearly 1100 US Dollars and that’s if you can even get your hands on them. So that’s not a real solution and even if they used a lower cost implementation like ours, the power delivery side of things is going to turn off a lot of people. The range of our qlabs uts-1, which is designed to go under the desk rather than only through a tiny thin pad, is up to one inch allowing it to comfortably penetrate most desktops. But as you guys already saw, it can still be a little bit finicky for placement.
Um, I mean with the phone it’s a little bit better, I’m able to line it up pretty well and it’s still expensive. It costs 150 US dollars. This demo was supposed to show how it’s easier to line up with the phone hello buddy, but in spite of these cost and design challenges, we still don’t think, there’s any excuse.
I mean we already showed that it costs about two dollars to add the power receiving side to a keyboard like the MX mechanical mini, so that shouldn’t increase the price by something like this by more than a couple percent. And while this might be a little janky, even by our standards, we built a proof of concept charging pad that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks at retail. We just taped.
Oh there it is nine charging coils onto a piece of cardboard and then, if you watch, we just uh put it under one of our stylish Northern Lights desk. Pads, hey and the point is this proof of concept works, I’m great, but it works bottom lineman. Angry meow makes high quality products, but we shouldn’t have to rely on a premium Niche brand to develop a feature that has been standard in other tech for upwards of a decade. What is it Logitech? What are you afraid of Razer, I mean heck? Even Apple – should have been on top of this by now legitimately. This is a real question like if you guys know why. No one has done this, please let us know in the comments below. If you go ahead and use the DIY option to add wireless charging to your keyboard, hey, let us know how it went in the LTT form thread. That’S Linked In the description.
Perhaps we could use that thread as a bit of a repository for others who are seeking out a truly Wireless life. One idea that I’ve actually been toying with for a while is embedding the wireless charger in the tabletop surface so that I don’t have to deal with one of these high power through the desk ones and then taking my Logitech power play mat and then embedding that, Like routing out the shape of it and embedding that in the surface and then just laying a desk mat over the entire thing, how stealthy would that be stealthy like the same way to responds? I fix it big thanks to them for sponsoring this video, tired of overpaying to repair your broken devices. Well, don’t worry, you can fix it yourself. Ifixit has professionally written guides to help you repair your own broken devices at a fraction of the cost of a professional repair.
Each guide includes detailed pictures of every step of the process and they even sell the parts and tools that you’ll need on their website. To celebrate their 20th anniversary, iFixit is currently giving away a free T-shirt with every purchase of a hundred dollars or more use code, fix it shirt upon checkout and claim your free gift. If you guys, like this video, maybe check out the time that we used y charge to power a toy train, it really did seem like Wireless power throughout the room was just over the horizon, but as far as we can tell uh, they haven’t really gone anywhere. Since then, .