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The Membrane Part of the Keyboard

A project log for Commodore CHESSmate Reproduction

The plan is to make a reproduction of the dedicated chess computer CHESSmate released by Commodore in 1978.

michael-gardiMichael Gardi 12/27/2023 at 22:360 Comments

I haven't figured out all the details for how the "membrane" keyboard will work , but I do know that I will be needing the artwork that rests on top of the switches, 7-segment displays, and LEDs. So I spent a couple of days re-learning Inkscape (since I don't use it enough to be truly proficient), and produced this:  

I started with a scan of the originals keyboard:

which I brought in to Inkscape at a 1:1 scale as the bottom most layer and basically traced the various elements using Inscapes vast array of drawing tools on "higher" layers. I was also lucky enough to find a font, "Christ 100", that was a pretty close match to the originals which saved a lot of time.  Not so lucky with the A-H 1-8 button characters which had to be carefully traced and rendered as lines and Bezier curves.

As a quick check of the fit:

A perfect fit.

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