YouTuber goes above & beyond to cram mechanical keyboard into laptop

YouTuber, Marcin Plaza’s laptop keyboard was dying. In his latest video, Plaza rebuilds the budget Lenovo laptop and crams in a full mechanical keyboard.

Plaza manages this by tearing the laptop down to its components. He then “cosplays a mechanical engineer” and redesigned the case. This took him over 12 hours to complete.

The laptop’s new keyboard, the TL84-B, is made by Redragon and was also harvested for parts. Even after getting the finished print of the chassis, Plaza still found the keyboard to be too fat.

Stripping the laptop down to the motherboard, Plaza also shucked a USB-C dongle from its shell. The latter half of the video follows the modder as he assembles the final build.

It’s not an overly complex build, with Plaza opting to use the dongle as a hub as a central point of connection. There’s no manual wiring involved until Plaza’s method of hooking up the keyboard.

As Plaza used the hub rather than manually rewiring everything, he had to create a hidden USB-A port. The new chassis has only one USB-A port, with the third hidden inside.

Plaza soldered the connection pins on the USB port to connect the keyboard to the keyboard’s wires.

While Plaza’s editing makes assembly look incredibly hectic, the finished laptop is impressively pleasant on the eyes. Even in its cobbled-together, “jank” way.

This isn’t Plaza’s first time recycling old computers for use. Last month he posted a video where he turned “e-waste” into a DIY home server.

His channel has 8.12K followers and has slowly been picking up steam recently, with views rising each video. The laptop video has nearly 150,000 views more than the e-waste server video.