Bad Logic

I couldn't take the way the backlight kept going out on the Logitech...often not coming back even if I picked up the keyboard in both hands and waved it.

I mean, I understand the engineering choices. They wanted to have one of the few light-up wireless keyboards. But that's so power-hungry they had to design it to dim the lights at every opportunity. And they presumably won't change it because then they'd get bad reviews for short battery life (because people are morons).

So I opened it up. Identifying the backlight was simple; one clear JST connector that couldn't be anything else. Tried 5V (USB on it). No go. Measured the terminal, and -- again because of that battery-saving software -- the meter kept jumping around but it looked like as much as forty volts. Tried twelve, still nothing. Fine. Tore down further so I could look at the actual lights.

And then my respect for the engineers went up because this was clearly an electroluminescent display. Which certainly explained the weird power readings!

Snipped the connector and wired it to an EL inverter I picked up on eBay. Got a little warm but ran fine. Put the keyboard back together...and I'd damaged the eyebrow connector. Superglue did not work; it got into the pins and it was a real mess cleaning it up. Finally got it all back by cutting the connector shorter, scraping the exposed traces, jamming a shaved scrap of credit card in to hold the cable down.

All but the "a" and "3." Which isn't enough to be a whole leg of the matrix meaning I damaged a trace taking the keyboard apart to look at that light panel.

But there's just barely enough there to test...and it turns out that weird delay I noticed is absolutely there. So this thing is basically shit to begin with, because who can type on a keyboard that has a slight delay?

I wrote a three-star review but Amazon removed it.