My first sub $200 board since 2018.  Okay, I’ve used sub $200 boards since 2018, but to be fair, I’ve not bought any to add to my collection. That all changed with the Neo Ergo. Last time I purchased a brand new keyboard kit at this price range was the original Tofu60. At the time, there weren’t many budget keyboard kits, and they were nowhere near as premium as budget keyboards are today. Many times they didn’t even come with PCBS and plates. It was expected that you were a hobbyist and that you were going to do your research in order to source your own internals.  The Ergo's internals are simple, but completely custom and proprietary. Which comes to the next point when it comes to older budget builds. It was all standardized. For better or worse, universal 60 percent boards were the norm. The Poker series keyboards popularized a standardized standoff location that was carried through early custom traymount keyboards like the once famous Hammer case. There is a...

Alright, I’ll finally own up to it – there’s a lot of “copying” that happens in the mechanical keyboard switch world. While I don’t think that “everything is just a recolor of some other switch” nor do I think that “all linears are basically the same” as so many newer people to the hobby would claim, there’s definitely quite a bit of heavy handed inspiration taken from the past in the development of newer switches. A sort of ‘copy my homework but mess up a few answers’ vibe, if you will. Fundamentally, though, this shouldn’t be too surprising when you consider the limitations that exist in switches being developed within the very specific MX footprint. Gone are the days of companies developing entirely new switches, actuating mechanisms, and machinery to produce such all on their own and in order to make your switches marketable to the masses, they need to fit in with the shape, size, and style of MX switches. Naturally this near standardization of designs in the hobby leads to the...

CTRL + F to quickly skip to each tip/trick below: Tip #1 - Cheap Dust Cover (Shower Caps) Tip #2 - Upgrade Your Wire Keycap Puller to Plastic Tip #3 - Test Your PCB/QC Your Board Before Building Soldering-Specific: Tip #4 - Take Your Time. Set Yourself up for Soldering Success Tip #5 - Using the Right Size Soldering Tip Tip #6 - Soldering Loose Switches/Plateless Builds - Rubber Bands Tip #7 - Fixing Crooked Switches After Soldering Extra Tip - Test Your PCB After Soldering… BEFORE You Put Away Your Soldering Equipment Intro & Disclaimer A recent mistake. Mixed three sets of beige PBT keycap sets and spent a good while having to separate everything... “I wish I had known about this sooner…” I can’t tell you the amount of times that I’ve said those words out loud, or thought about them when it comes to the keyboard hobby. Whether it’s what someone in the community has told me, or something I found out myself, even things that may seem so simple as using...

If you watched Star Wars for the first time, without seeing images of the Empire’s perfectly spaced thousands of goose-stepping minions in spotless white-lacquered armor. If you didn’t see the fleets of black and grey tie-fighters, the immaculately designed star cruisers, the evil moon-shaped flagship… you wouldn’t know that the rebels were rebels. After all, rebels don’t look like rebels if they don’t have something to contrast them against. They just look like normal people. That’s probably why when you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Finn (all rebels) dressed in stormtrooper garb, they somehow seem even more rebellious then they were before. It’s not what they’re wearing, it’s how they wear it. Dirty, scuffed, broken. Helmet missing or askew. An out of place, beat up weapon slung diagonally across their body. It’s the simple act of defacing the uniform that identifies them in our mind as counter-cultural. Funnily enough, it works in reverse. To the dismay of...

Welcome back to this series where we’re designing kick-ass keymaps! After covering basics like how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers and the potential of custom keymaps, we took the first real steps in designing your tailor-fit keymap by looking into some options for compiling a corpus in general and also with a more useful personal corpus in mind. Quick recap: in this context, corpus is simply a fancy name for a big chunk of text. Today, we’re going to analyze your corpus (or pretty much any text if you haven't done your homework yet) and discuss some basic language statistics along with common metrics that can be used to quickly evaluate a keymap, and also to compare layouts. This is the next logical step in our journey if you're aiming to craft the optimal keymap for yourself. Character/bigram/trigram frequencies To begin with, let's examine the character frequencies in our corpus. The occurrence of different letters can vary significantly not only between...

As we publish more articles in the "Mech Keys How-To" series currently ongoing, navigating the various topics and finding previous articles will only become more difficult. This thread will serve as a table of contents to help add some structure to the whole project. Feel free to also suggest future topics in this thread, as it will surely be easier to identify gaps and opportunities for further exploration when viewing everything as a whole. Mechanical Keyboards Introductory Topics Mechanical vs Membrane Sizes and Layouts of Mechanical Keyboards Short Intro Into Split Keyboards (dovenyi) Staggered and Ortholinear Layouts Low-Profile vs High-Profile Keyboard Designs Build Materials and Other Case Design Considerations Selecting Your First Mechanical Keyboard (The_Manic_Geek) Keyboard Layouts Support for Alternate Layouts (dvorcol) What is SpaceFN and why you should give it a try (dovenyi) Keymap Layout Analysis (Keymap wizardry: Typing out the Harry Potter saga)...