Cherry MX Spring Modification

A few years ago, I did a spring mod of some Cherry MX switches that made it a little harder to press certain keys, but it was an imperfect solution. I don't remember how I got to looking for a single-spring solution, but I found a bunch that had higher forces than the stock 80cN springs I was using, and it was hard to decide what sort of force to go with without testing them. I went with 210 gram force springs and ordered about 3 dozen of them because I didn't need too many and they weren't all that cheap.

The springs in a bag.

While they look quite long, that was a length I wasn't concerned about since it was really more about the compressed length that was one of the limiting factors. It's slightly larger in diameter than the standard springs, but it still fits fine. This spring makes it a bit harder to reassemble the switch, but not difficult or impossible. Once I had the switch on a board, it was a lot harder to press than I thought (or tried before soldering), but it's blatantly obvious when accidentally hitting it. I think the spring moves a bit weird in the switch because the click doesn't always happen when the switch actuates, so I could've used a red or silent red or whatever instead of the blue stem, oh well.

Hackintosh

With some of the programmes I was writing (the world clocks one being the one I remember best), a friend wanted to be able to use it, but he daily drives Mac OS, so there wasn't an easy way to allow him to use it without compiling the programme. And because i3rd was superceded by Pod, I decided to put i3rd to use by making a hackintosh. I used the 120GB 2.5 inch SSD from the double drive pi (I think that was the Raspberry Pi 3?) as the boot drive since I wasn't going to need a huge amount of space and I didn't want to buy anything if I didn't have to.

I found some reddit where someone did a hackintosh with the same DeskMini that I have but with a generation older CPU and went the same route as them since there was the links to the instructions and stuff. It wasn't too bad from what I remember, but I think there were times that I wasn't sure if the installation was being slow or if it froze.

The one thing I couldn't figure out how to fix was getting more VRAM than 5MB, I tried a lot of things and eventually decided to just live with it. I did get whichever stuff tested/compiled and such, though with one of them, the GUI glitches out when running, which is likely due to the lack of VRAM (this was during testing and it didn't get compiled or shared).

I have plans to try a Mac OS VM with VirtualBox (since it might allow me to have 128MB of VRAM), but I keep forgetting about it. It's uncertain when my friend will shift to Apple Silicon, but it'll be when I'll grab a Mac Mini with the same SoC to not have to worry about using a VM or having VRAM issues.

Qt5

Sometime after making a GUI programme to help a friend run a trivia game (I guess beginning of last year), I started looking into Qt5 because I was having problems with certain Unicode characters causing Tkinter to either crash or screw with displayed text. Might've been other reasons, but it's so long ago that I don't remember.

I learned it by converting my Tkinter programmes, and it was fairly easy to learn since I already had learned a lot of the logic from Tkinter. I think it might've been a couple weeks before I fell in love with Qt5. Anyway, there was a lot of learning and having to go back to programmes I previously converted to add/fix stuff.

Also I think around this time I also learned classes better, which made things easier to do.

It probably was after a couple or so months that I kinda lost steam to convert all the Tkinter programmes (probably because I hardly ever used the last couple I had to left convert) and just moved onto new projects. One of those projects was having a programme that helps me do stuff in EAGLE CAD in the sense that I can plug values into it and it spits out the value I'm looking for. I do know that EAGLE has ULPs, but that's a C-like language and not Python. Anyway, the reason for this is that it was time consuming to draw the parts of the board layout in Fusion 360 to get a value (sometimes having to do this multiple times), and it really is just all mathematics in the end. Also, I'm sticking with EAGLE 7.7.0 btw because it's annoying to have to login for the free version of EAGLE 8+, especially if I'm needing to just look at something real quick.

Anyway, each calculation I made into its own class and then used the main class to place it in the category it belongs to for display. It took a while to figure out how to arrange all the classes without making the window too large, and I ended up finding QScrollArea that really helped keep the width of the programme minimal. After a couple months of working on it (and still not being done), I decided to just leave it for now, since everything within it works and I have around 4000 lines of code. Yeah, I should probably break the classes into their own modules instead, but I don't really feel like working on it regardless.

What it currently looks like.
The precision selection, Ω button, and µ button was added later (the buttons put the corresponding symbols on the clipboard). (Also Qt5 allows for clipboard reading/writing, which is really nice.)

I've also done a world clock sort of programme that utilises QDateTime and QTimeZone, which I think are better than Python's built-in date/time/timezone solution? There's also QTimer which allows a function to be ran after the set timer expires (which is used in said world clock programme to update the time display every second instead of using a while loop and time.sleep(), also you can stop a QTimer with code but not time.sleep()). At this point, I forgot what Tkinter provided that Qt5 doesn't, but I've long adapted to it with a lot of the other things Qt5 provides. It also has its own multi-threading framework, which I think is also easier to use than Python's, especially if I've been using it here and there for things that can really leverage multiple threads.

It was earlier this year when Qt6 was released, and I decided to poke with it a bit since I probably should move to it, but ran into issues on one of the programmes I converted as a test. There were some name changes (QRegExp → QRegularExpression) or ways to access certain items (QMessageBox.Ok → QMessageBox.StandardButtons.Ok), and when I got everything fixed up, it worked... except for the theme. I use a weird mixture of qt5ct and Kvantum, and just couldn't figure out how to stylise/theme Qt6 to match.

Qt5 with the style/theme I have set, Qt6 default style/theme (I'm assuming).

And speaking of name changes, when I was trying to load the Qt6 version of the programme, I ran into more errors because of more name changes (QMessageBox.StandardButtons.Ok → QMessageBox.StandardButton.Ok and Qt.Alignment.AlignCenter → Qt.AlignmentFlag.AlignCenter) (frustration noises here). Anyway I dunno when Qt5 will be end of life, but it probably won't be for at least a few years, and hopefully whenever the time comes, Qt6 will have the maturity that Qt5 currently has.