model NN-SN966S Lost all control of the keypad exept Reset

SOLUTION OK, My Panasonic SN966S Microwave suddenly died yesterday. Also after 2.5 years of average use, it suddenly started beeping and cycling through power levels before going totally unresponsive. My wife was distraught at the thought of no microwave for the next 10 days. So I dissasembled it and was able to confirm it is the Membrane keypad that seems to have failed.

I wasn't able to remove the membrane keypad, and I had no replacement redily available. So I pondered what would be the next best thing. My wife would be happy if we could warm tea or vegatables, so we don't need all the fancy extra keys.

My best estimate was that one of the rows or colums was shorting out 100% of the time, causing the keyboard Matrix to no longer be readable by the CPU.

I guessed that if I was able to break the short open, all would be good. But that looked like a lot of work to attempt to hack open the mebrane and risk destroying it, and the aesthetics would not make my wife happy.

So I experimented, with a strip of mylar about 0.2 inches wide, I slipped it into the " CN5 " keyboard connector socket, and moved it through the 9 trace positions until I found a wire that I could disable, and bring the unit back to life.

To my surprise after 6 failed attempts the 7th position gave me a bit of happiness. By isolating the 7th trace ( counting from top to bottom ) on the flexible membrane cable, I was able to isolate the short and the microwave came back to life !

I admit its not " good as new" , the "2 shows up as a 3" and the "power level button no longer works :-) ) but for a penny and 30 minutes of your time, it lets us use it until if and when we decide to replace the keyboard with a new one.

Here are the picks of the mylar strip in white