Just how dangerous is the wrong sort of tape?

Learning and discussion Custom keyboards
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I know that “tape mods” are popular right now. I have a keyboard using one.

My question is about the safety. It turns out that some tapes are conductive:

I know that most of you are using electrical tape, or 3M painters’ tape, but I thought I should share that person’s experience.

How badly can this go wrong? Could a PCB with the wrong tape cause damage to a device that it’s plugged in to?

(My NCR-80 is tape-modded. TBH, the PCB on that thing always seemed suspect to me. Used to type gibberish on its own after resuming from standby.)

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A person I knew had problems with the tape causing problems registering the actuated keys. They were using masking tape, which was weird to me.

I have two boards that use OEM painters tape, and both are functioning well so far. I have also made sure to not cover the MCU to avoid burning it (it’s more of a just-in-case thing since I doubt MCUs on keyboards can heat up like that, but I’ve seen stories if it happening).

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Yeah, I think mine used electrical tape that wouldn’t interfere with the PCB.

It’s just that there have been some weird issues. The aforementioned gibberish when coming out of sleep [only with the tape-modded NCR-80], and also my desktop PC recently died while coming out of standby with the NCR-80 plugged in!

But the board itself usually works fine, so there may be no problem at all and it’s just the PC having issues with the PCB.

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Typically the main issue that would present itself using conductive tape would be shorts. A majority of the time this would simply lead to unwanted keypresses

Edit: I should add this here. This is an extremely EXTREMELY unlikely event, but there is a potential for a short at the microcontroller to cause big issues (ie death of the microcontroller). If you experience shorting of any kind, it should be solved no matter how insignificant it seems.

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Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

No, I guess that wasn’t happening with my board. Just an unrelated matter to my PC issues.