Copper or silver-based should be lower resistance. These conductive paints tend not to be very conductive, the carbon stuff is essentially making a thin-film carbon composition resistor. Good for repairing rear window defroster heating elements, not so great as a 0-ohm trace in a keyboard. For short (<1cm) wires it’s usually not too bad, but with the amount of damage I’m not sure you’ll be able to repair the thing.
It looks like it might be from a Model M-style keyboard. Unicomp sells those.
Worth trying. It’s already broken, you can’t really make it much worse. It’d probably work, and worst case you’re back where you started & paying for expensive shipping.
You mean SNI, not ESNI. ESNI is the Encrypted Server Name Indication that gets around that, though the newer ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) is better in many ways. Not all sites support either though.
We’ve had open-source chip design software since the 1980s. Magic VLSI, for example. There are quite a few OSS tools for various parts of the chip design process.
Also bleeding-edge processes mean smaller, thinner gates. That’s what gives them the fast switching speeds, but it reduces the max allowable voltage. For parts that need to handle more than 1.8V or so a modern 5nm process will just end up using bigger gates than the process is optimized for. May as well go with an older process (bigger minimum gate size) that’s better suited to switching the voltage needed. For Bosch (automotive parts, power tools, etc) they’re making a lot of parts with really big output transistors (switching 14V, 48V, etc) and not super high-performance processors.
The big disadvantage with particularly old processes is that they used smaller wafers. So fewer chips per wafer processed, meaning lower overall yields and higher price/chip. The switch from 200mm wafers to 300mm in 1999 meant the wafer area increased by a factor of 2.25! 300mm wafers also required fully-automated factories due to the weight of a wafer carrier (a front opening wafer pod, or FOUP, is 7-9kg when loaded with 25 wafers), which save on labor costs. So processes older than 1999 (around the 180nm node) are sometimes not worth it even for power electronics.
Just about any soldering iron should work. Chisel tips are better than round tips for most work. I really like J tips as well, they’ve got a range of usable surface sizes without having to change tip just by turning the iron around.
Put a piece of heat shrink tubing on one wire.
Strip the ends, and form a Western Union splice in the wires to hold them.
Set the iron to 350°C, and let it heat up. If your iron doesn’t have temperature control, it’s cheap crap and should probably just be thrown in the trash since it’ll tend to over-heat and lift pads when soldering PCBs. Continue for now, that doesn’t matter as much for soldering wires.
Then apply a tiny bit of solder to the tip of the iron so that it can make good contact, apply flux to the bit where the wires join (do NOT skip flux), touch the solder to the wires, and then touch the iron to the other side of the wires. The solder should quickly melt & flow into the joint.
Remove the solder, then remove the iron.
Let the joint cool, then slide the heat shrink up over the joint and shrink it with a heat gun.
Crimp connectors tend to be stronger and more vibration-proof than solder, but sometimes space constraints mean that soldered splices are necessary. Also crimpers are expensive, for many wire-to-wire crimp families the official crimpers are several hundred dollars.
Mini-PV is the standard (in that DuPont used to make them), but the M20 clones are more common. It was created by Berg, who got bought out by DuPont, who spun those off to FCI and then that went to Amphenol decades ago. Then Harwin made their M20 connectors as a near clone of Mini-PV, but they aren’t a perfect fit with Mini-PV housings (and vice versa). M20 won’t fit in a Mini-PV housing, and Mini-PV will be loose in an M20 housing. Then tons of other manufacturers started cloning M20. Most cheap leads you get will be M20.
I tend to just make my own M20 jumpers since that lets me set the length. Mini-PV is necessary if you want more options for wire gauge or spring tension though.
The Internet corollary to Murphy's Law: If you post something, it's public forever unless you need it later, then it'll have link-rotted. Anything you want to delete will be archived, anything you want to save will be deleted.
The SensePeek PCBite system is really nice. They're the best board holders I've ever used, very stable. Great for testing, and great for soldering. The probes are ridiculously helpful, it's downright easy to probe adjacent pins on a 0.5mm pitch QFP (with some magnification)! All rather expensive, but very, very worth it for the time saved.