Keyboard freezing occasionally due to USB port alignment issue?

That’s High Sierra? It looks very much unlike what I was expecting.

It could be a bad cable, but I may have figured out another possible cause of this, thanks to another customer.

If you unplug the USB cable from your keyboard, does the jack alignment look like this?:

Or does it look like this?:

If it looks like the latter, there’s a chance that the problem is that the wooden enclosure was milled imprecisely and is pushing on the plastic baseplate, causing the USB jack to be misaligned with the plastic that protects it. This could either be stressing the cable or stressing the connector, causing a disconnect.

If this is the problem you’re running into, it’s easy to test – just loosen the screws on the bottom of the left half of the keyboard a bit and the jack should realign. You may be able to get away with only loosening the back three screws or you might have to loosen all of them.

If that realigns the jack, try running with it for a while and see if you continue to see disconnects.

If this fixes things, there are a couple more permanent solutions. We need to test them before giving you actual advice, but the three we’ve thought of so far are:

  • sand the wooden enclosure near the USB jack just a bit to relieve the pressure on the plastic
  • sand the plastic of the USB jack protector to relieve the pressure on the plastic
  • Insert plastic washers between the baseplate screws and the enclosure.

That last one is, by far, the least invasive solution. It’s also the only one that I’m not sure will work. I’m going to need to source a variety of plastic washers to see which ones fit correctly.

If the problem you’re seeing is caused by this issue and the washer solution appears to work correctly without causing other issues, we’d be happy to tell you which washers seem to work best and to send some out to you to test.

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