Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I've been considering a W530 for a while now, but as for many others, the keyboard is an absolute no-go. After doing some research, especially in this forum, I think I may have found a solution.

This is not tested; I don't have the hardware for it. But I know others do, and that they are willing to try. I'm making this thread in the hopes that someone might have a go at it and report their findings.

The facts so far:
- **20 keyboards can be plugged into **30 machines. The plug is compatible. In order to fit the keyboard mechanically, a new palmrest might be needed. (Source)
- After the swap, 5 keys won't work: PrintScreen, ScrollLock, Pause, Insert, Home. (Source)
- After the swap, some keys are mapped incorrectly. A BIOS mod would be necessary to cleanly solves this isse. There don't seem to be any successful mods yet.

Here's some more information:
- It is possible to reroute keys on the **20 keyboards with some effort. (Source)
- The Japanese layout has 5 more keys than the US layout. (Picture) Next to backspace, next to right-shift and around the spacebar. Obviously those keys are connected to the keyboard controller and work.
- Wrongly mapped keys can be remapped using tools such as Autohotkey, Sharpkeys or udev.

So this is the plan:
1) Someone will have to buy a Japanese **30 keyboard, open it up and figure out how the extra keys are wired up
2) Now a **20 keyboard is opened up and all the dead keys are cut off and rewired to the same lines we have figured out in 1)
3) Insert the rewired **20 keyboard into the Thinkpad
4) Remap keys on the OS level with aforementioned tools

This wouldn't be a very clean mod. It won't work until the OS has booted. It involves some manual work. But I am confident it can be done.

What do you think?

haarp wrote:What do you think?

Just buy a **20 laptop and forget about such mods.

Aside from an engineering challenge PoV they have no practical value.

As you said: It's not very clean, it involves lots of manual work and fiddling with small traces for every single keyboard unit you want to mod (which may affect long-term reliability of this solution), it requires OS-level workarounds to work (which may have negative effects working with external keyboards), and all for what? To gain one generation of computing power?

If there were big differences in performance or feature-sets between *20 and *30 Thinkpads, I could see the value. But there aren't.

If this was a mod which you could take with you to multiple generation of Thinkpads, I could see the value. But already the *31/*40 series have made the keyboards physically incompatible, so going forward you'll have to either adapt or abandon Thinkpads altogether.

A truly clean, proper BIOS/FW mod (if someone figures out where the hell this darn table is, and how to change it) would still be interesting, because it's something simple, a one-time flash operation that you apply once per machine, and then you can use any off-the-shelf keyboard, and it always works, regardless of OS or third-party software. But if that never comes - not a great loss either.

Yeah just not worth it. I've got Thinkpads from T420 back to T42 but Elitebooks, Lattitude, Fujitsu, or Asus for anything newer.

This mod may suffer from mechanical instability, sure.

If you are willing to ignore that, I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) that only the Back and Forward keys do not exist in the **30.

You would not need a Japanese keyboard for this. The existing keys only need to be routed to their proper positions.

For back and forward, you can do a dirty trick: rewire them so that they "press" Alt and Left or Right arrow at the same time. Alt+Left and Alt+Right produce the same effect of the Back and Forward keys. You would only need to rewire into Japanese keys if for some reason you absolutely need to generate distinct scan codes for them.

Done this way, the keyboard mod would work without drivers and without BIOS mods, out of the box.

Parts needed would be a **20 keyboard and a **30 keyboard which you would buy to dismantle and check where the keys are connected to.

Other than some of a theysa not working and the trackpoint being a big maybe. Someone from another website had posted that they had success in tossing a T410 keyboard onto a T430.
It looked like they had to do some filing down on parts of the keyboard, but regular typing seems OK.

Here's the link to ThinkWiki