Most of these will be backlogs, I'm trying to muster up strength to write out these old backlogs and give the project a more flushed out context.

For a good view into the apple keyboard II check out this desk authority wiki listing:

https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Keyboard_II

There were 2 manufactures of this keyboard, smk and mitsumi. The cases have small differences and from my very small sample it looks like the smk ones were of a little higher quality.

The internals of both include: 

• Controller PCB - printed circuit board with controller mcu as well as ADB connectors/reset switch
• Metal backing Plate - this is curved, all the keys are same height, it's the physical shape of the board that is stepped
• plastic printed circuit sheets - contains the keyboard matrix and connects to the controller board via fpc like connection
• plastic molded layer- determines the key layout and holds the barrels as well as locks the printed circuit sheets in place
• top and bottom case

My first attempt at building the board i wanted to mimic the separate controller and keyboard matrix, with the idea that you could make the controller modular and reuse the same matrix.

A breakdown of revision 1 as follows:

• Separate Controller PCB and Keyboard matrix
• Controller had a teensy ++, adafruit bluefruit, adafruit powerboost, slide switch for power and reused the mini din connectors from the old controller boards
• A forbidden cable of USB -> Mini Din connector was made for the external connection then a weird spliced open hand wired mini usb internally. I wanted to reuse the old cable and it's hard to beat that coiled cable fun. It was electrically passing the 4 usb connections just wired to the mini-din
• Three separate 2x10 1.27mm pitch cables were used to connect the matrix to the controller board. This ended up not working so great as the heads of the connectors were rather large and prevented the case from closing. I ended up breaking the plastic seperation bar (the one between numpad and rest of the keyboard) of the top case so it could close.
• The slide switch was positioned in the approximate area were the reset button would be so you could reach in and toggle battery power

Below you can see revision one pictured:

Breadboard version:

Made a protoboard controller:

assembled:

It was functional! however the case fit wasn't perfect and even after breaking off the plastic the case wore down on those 1.27mm connecting cables. I Should note this proto comes long before my confidence in SMD soldering took place hence using available through hole parts. Theoretically would make it easier to hand solder everything and make an easier diy project but I was on the fence about the practicality of it.

Also to note you can assume that in-between revisions there's a kinda constant tweaking and remeasuring so i could get the case fit better, some compromises were also made when designing controller boards to make them fit in both styles of cases vs one.

I'd consider revision 1 a clunky diy quasi success but it was nowhere near as clean as I wanted it which leads to r.2 which I'll cover in the next backlog