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It's amazing how good true vintage ALPS keyboards are. I have a keyboard with Matias (ALPS clone) switches and they are great to type on, but the switches seem unreliable and I got tired of replacing them.

Inconveniently, vintage Apple keyboards require ADB to USB converters which aren't readily available.

I wish Apple would apply their design expertise to making a modern, reliable(!), electromechanical keyboard that replicated the feel and performance of classic ALPS keyboards.



I ended up making my own adapter based on a cheap CH32X035 dev board [0] - largely as an excuse to also write an 'RTOS' for RISC-V. The code is available on GitHub [1] though I haven't really documented it.

[0] - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005718558442.html

[1] - https://github.com/benpye/rtos




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