Drop SENSE75 Barebones Mechanical Keyboard

Getting the Gasket Mount Just Right Achieving a great gasket mount feel isn’t about throwing gaskets on a plate and calling it a day. The quantity of gaskets, thickness, and enclosure style, are just a few of the many factors that need to be considered. Some gasket-mount keyboards are too stiff—gasket in name only. Meanwhile, others go overboard and ultimately feel mushy. For the SENSE75, our goal was to find the right middleground to give a pleasant bounce while retaining nimble performance. While subjective experiences are important, we quickly determined that an objective performance benchmark was important for us to define. Having no standards in the community to rely upon, we built a custom rig in order to measure the force curves of switches mounted on gasket keyboards in order to visually observe the performance of each board. When pressing a key on a gasket keyboard, the ideal result is that after the switch bottoms out, the gaskets (and plate) continue to allow...

A Switch in Direction Volumes of posts have been written about the advantages and disadvantages of south- vs. north-facing switches, measurement of interference (or lack thereof), and LED backlighting. Suffice to say, “OG Cherry” keycaps are a mainstay in the mechanical keyboard industry and they do make slight contact with most MX-switches that are oriented in the typical north direction. To maximize compatibility of the SENSE75, we’ve flipped our hot-swappable sockets so that all switches will be south facing. This also intrinsically eliminates switch-to-keycap contact and interference for an unimpeded typing experience. Staying Hot-Swappable After testing different types and brands of hot-swappable sockets, we found 5-pin PCB mount Kaihua sockets to be the best choice for the SENSE75. In our switch socket selection process, we took painstaking care choosing the right set components to drastically reduce bent switch pins—a common issue caused when the plate and...