Mounting a 102 keyboard into a 100

The keyboard is from the Tandy 102, and unlike the TRS-80 Model 100’s keyboard, the 102 keyboard doesn’t actually get firmly attached to a 102 case, it just sits on top of plastic stand-offs.

This meant I had to make the 102 keyboard “compatible” with the 100 mounting arrangement, which involved drilling five holes into the PCB at the appropriate spots. Luckily the layout of traces is precisely the same between the 100 and 102 keyboards so there wasn’t any risk of harming anything important on the PCB.

A couple examples of new holes and correction of misaligned holes:

Again, alignment was tricky, but I was able to use a felt-marker to put a lot of ink on the standoffs that the keyboard needs to screw into in the Model 100 case and then place the 102 keyboard in the right spot, and some of the the ink transferred well enough to give me the drill spots. There’s probably a better way to do this, but this worked for me.

So I’m going through the trouble of retrofitting a Tandy 102 keyboard inside a Model 100 case, and you might be asking, why couldn’t I have used the Tandy 102 case for the whole project? Well, there just isn’t enough room in a 102 as it is significantly thinner. The 100 case has the right amount of room for this all of these parts to fit properly.

Keyboard is properly mounted.