Together with the keymat designer and manufacturer, we worked out a solution to improve the backlit keyboard and make everything evenly illuminated.
If you followed the last newspost about the backlight, you know that the lighting doesn't work yet properly, as not enough light gets from the LED to the top of the key. Right now, we've got 1 LED for four keys. Their light is mainly being absorbed by the black paint on top of the keymat, so it's not really distributed and therefore doesn't look good.
So, here are the solutions we worked out, that should improve things a lot:
1. There will be a reflective silver layer below the black one. The light is not being absorbed anymore but reflected.
2. The PCB will have a huge white silklayer. Then the light will also be reflected back from the PCB. Thanks to 1. and 2. together, the light will not be absorbed but distributed inside the whole keymat.
3. The amount of LEDs will be increased. Instead of one LED that lights up 4 keys, we now have one LED for 3 keys.
4. The material and printed color on the keymat will be made a bit more transparent.
These changes will all be done right away, so that the prototypes will already have them included.
My contact in Greece also had a meeting with the mould production company today, so expect some more news from there as well within the next few days.
Want to leave feedback? Visit: https://boards.openpandora.org/topic/5600195-reflect-the-leds/