What do you do when you have multiple keycap sets of the same profile? Naturally, it's time to mix things up with a mashup!
We've been working on some mashups ourselves, with some more to showcase in the coming days. Check out a few of our mashups below, and share your own in the comments!
Additionally, we are giving away all of the keycap sets (5 or 6 complete keycap sets, plus accents when applicable) used in each round of mashups to one lucky winner per round! (Edit: Round 1 Giveaway on Discord has concluded as of 1:55PM Central on Sept 6th, 2023; Round 2 Giveaway via Gleam on-site below has concluded as of Sept 10th; Round 3 Giveaway via Gleam on-site below has concluded as of Sept 12th; all winners have been notified!)
MT3 Susuwatari + MT3 3277 Acid Green Accents
Keysterine Cyanide + Keysterine Raspberry
DCX White-on-Black + DCX Black-on-White
Round 3 Giveaway Winnings
What are your favorite keycap mashups? Share your creations in...
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)
Keycaps
Keycap Materials
Keycap Profiles
How To Design a GMK Keycap Set (GMK_Andy)
The GMK Color Matching Process (GMK_Andy)
Switches
Introduction to Mechanical Keyboard Switches (ThereminGoatMK)...
As someone who has been writing documentation in the mechanical keyboard hobby space for many years now, I can say with utter confidence that there’s a lot of misinformation still floating around the hobby today. While some portion of these claims and community-wide thoughts can be traced back to dubious videos or posts that may as well have been carved into stone line by line, a good amount of the strange ideas still permeating throughout the hobby have come passed down in the form of community wisdom. Surely you recall your friend who got you into keyboards telling you to ‘Just do X’ or ‘Stay away from Y because of Z’, right? More likely than not, that is the same wisdom that their friend who got them into the hobby first shared with them several years ago. As you can probably put together, this mechanical keyboard-themed telephone game has led to quite some prolific ideas being spread over the years that are completely detached from reality. These tall tales, blatant lies, and...
Hey all The Skeleton here i've been talking with some users of geekhack and been seeing all of there amazing artisans and I have told them of getting more artisans on MD and they weren't exactly pleased they don't think artisans belong here.
But what do you think? Would you want some more artisans on Massdrop, they would of course have to be small drops but they would still be there at least.
I've noticed that there are many people from Europe which would love to join more drops but are confronted with huge shipping costs and taxes making most products more expensive than they'd be on retail.
Also, I've seen that some products actually come from Sweden, Germany etc. in the first place.
Is there any chance that European vendors could ship directly to European customers or that we'll se a department for other countries in the future?
Mechanical Keyboards 101 - An Introduction To The Hobby
Introduction
Let’s tackle the first and most obvious question here: “What’s the deal with these mechanical keyboards, and why in the hell would you pay $100+ for one?!” This simple question is unsurprisingly difficult to answer in many ways. Here's one reason and a thousand words worth:
Hate the way this one looks? I guarantee you I can find one you'll adore somewhere!
Mechanical keyboards are more than just a fancy tech accessory or noisy-disco-show to display on your desk. Mechanical keyboards are a full blown hobby with a huge cult following, years of history containing community DIY projects and group buys, dedicated forums (and silly forum drama), niche’s within the niche (like artisan keycaps), and more recently big brand names investing, collaborating, and directly interacting with the enthusiast community.
Personally, I’ve been heavily involved in the mechanical keyboard community for many years. I run KeyChatter.com - a website dedicated entirely to...
I thought it would be exceptionally helpful to have a post discussing keyboard layouts, showing what "standard physical layouts" are, and showing what keys differ for many popular alternative layout keyboards. I am not pointing out correct legend placement with these pictures, with programmable boards that would just be a nightmare. It should also be mentioned that I am basing this guide on sculpted profiles (SA, DCS, Cherry, Alps, etc) and NOT uniform profiles like DSA or XDA.
Here is the standard keyboard layout (ANSI and ISO). I have color coded the graphic in this way:
60% - Light Blue
TKL/80% - Green
TK/Fullsize/100% - Yellow
ISO - Dark Blue (Keys that differ from standard ANSI)
So, with this system any keyboard that is covered by light blue/green/yellow caps alone SHOULD be covered by a standard 104 keycap set (like Ducky, Tai Hao, etc). Keep in mind a few more boards can be covered by these sets, just not with the correct profile for each key.
At the end of this article...
I've designed a few keycap sets (Jukebox SA and Jukebox Cubic, GMK Honeywell: The Deskthority Set of the Year in 2017, and GMK Mint Dolch). I've collaborated on countless others, and I've picked up a few good tips and tricks for creating a successful keycap set along the way.
Massdrop has been heavily involved in the mechanical keyboard community for a few years now, and has really become one of the go-to places for custom keycap set drops. Before Massdrop most group buys for keycap sets were run on the forums, which had its ups and downs.
Almost two years ago I created the Jukebox keycap set, which ran on Massdrop as their first SA profile drop, with my second run of the set happening earlier this year. Though the overall design (color, profile) stayed the same, many aspects of the kit changes as a result of the ever changing community and popularity of custom sets since my first drop. A lot of thought and consideration went into the second drop, and I thought it may be...
Artisans are my favorite parts of keycaps, they are a labor of love that are unique and beautiful, and with all of these new artisans coming to Massdrop I ask. Which one is your favorite? my favorite artisan is the nebula series from jelly keys.
Migaloo is the only known all white humpback whale in the world. “Migaloo” is the aboriginal word for "white" in Australia
He was first sighted in the Australian waters in 1991. Since then, people have met him more than fifty times at different times and places, and one of the occasional encounters was particularly exciting. It was captured by photographer Jenny Dean at the Egira Bay in northern Queensland, Australia, the wonderful scene of Migaloo jumping over the water.
At that time, he was rushing out of the water with his symbolic backflip action. The long fins gracefully crossed the air. After hovering for about one or two seconds, the body weight was slowly twisted and fell, making great sound and huge waves.
The graceful "dance", dazzling white, seems to be in the fairy tale world.
Please drop a vote for this project and make it a reality here!
You can see a couple renders in this link right here!
Hope you're excited about the project, let me know your thoughts!
M
I apologize for any jimmies that may be rustled by this post, but I feel like this needs some attention. I used to LOVE Massdrop when I first got into the hobby of mechanical keyboards. I always wanted these fancy GMK and SA keycap sets and Massdrop seemed like the best place to get them, all other group buys are usually ran by a single person, seemed a lot less reliable to me at the time.
My opinion has pretty much pulled a complete 180 at this point. I used to defend MD as much as I possibly could, I figured people were just complaining cause they didn't understand MD isn't the actual manufacturer of these high-end keycap sets or custom keyboards and people didn't want to wait. Now I realize that while there are still (and will always be) people who complain about this, Massdrop needs some SERIOUS customer service improvement.
Here's the reddit post & linked imgur album that caused me to want to write up this post in the first place (this is not me):
http://imgur.com/a/6kAc1...
This is the Splitography for steno/chorded input.
For anyone who doesn't know, stenography allows you to press multiple keys simultaneously that correspond to syllables, words, or phrases. The keypress combos are in mnemonic patterns so that the more patterns you learn, the faster you learn more. The end result is that you can type blazingly fast with a relatively relaxed typing pace. The strange keycaps are designed to make it easier to type the combinations of keys required by stenography: one finger often has to press two rows simultaneously.
The tooling for the custom keycaps was expensive due to such low volume production, so I'm looking to see if anyone else knows about or is interested in learning stenography. Spreading out the tooling costs over multiple keyboards can make these boards very cheap very quickly relative to their original price.
Greetings everyone! We’re excited to pull back the curtain and reveal the premium membership program we’ve been working on the past few months as well as give a little insight into how we came up with it.
Initially we started by thinking about how other websites give back and improve the experience for their most dedicated users, as well as the various pros and cons in comparison to how our site works. Free expedited shipping makes sense if you’re placing multiple orders per month or even weekly from somewhere like Amazon. Or alternatively, monthly subscription boxes work well if you have lower-value consumable items that need to be replaced routinely like razor blades or cosmetics. We tossed around a lot of ideas, but coming up with something that made sense for keycaps- which are purchased infrequently and have a high value- was a slightly more challenging task.
After looking at the past 4 years of our keycap sales, we found that typical keyboard enthusiasts bought three sets...
hello guys , this is Crazy Designers from China!
Just like our name, we are a team of crazy designers, and the [Cyberboard] is a big project now we're working on. The inspiration comes from the Cybertruck of Tesla.
Specifications and common questions:
1. LEDs:
Programmable(you can customize the pattern like time, wavy lines and other not too complicated effects)
Resolution - 5*40
Supports USB 3.0
2. Mounting style: Gasket x Top mount
3. Weight: not finalized
4. Case materials: 6061 aluminium alloy
5. Plat:CNC and anodization production
6. Painting: anodized
7. Dimensions of the case: 340.5 x 181 x42.2mm
8. How steep is the angle of the case? 10°
9. Hot-swap? YES!
10. Layout: ANSI layout
If u guys got questions about the cyberboard, please feel free to let us know!Welcome to join our discord / follow our Instagram to follow the latest progress.
Discord server:https://discord.gg/su2DXde
Instagram:https://www.instagram...
We wanted to publish this article and give everyone an insider's look into the incredibly interesting process of making the colorful plastic that we all love: keycaps.
Step 1: Designs and Inspiration
You may know from your favorite designers like Matt3o, MiTo, Oblotzky, T0mb3ry, and Cassidoo that design inspiration doesn't just happen, it needs to be nurtured. These designers spend hundreds of hours thinking about concepts, developing them, scrapping and iterating to find the right theme that will grace thousands of keyboards.
There are a ton of constraints that these professionals need to consider when thinking about their designs. Beyond obvious aesthetic issues like colors and fonts, careful consideration like keycap profiles, extended board compatibility, multilingual legends and physical materials regularly come into play.
After all this, 3-dimensional renders need to be produced using CAD software to help fans visualize the product that we intend to bring to market...
Hey everybody!
Thank you for purchasing your Drop CTRL Mechanical Keyboard. We hope you’re enjoying it so far. If you’ve landed here, you probably want to take full advantage of the keyboard’s features so you’ve come to the right place.
We’ll start with the basics, then we’ll move on to complete custom configuration.
THE BASICS
Default Hot Keys
Hold FN + listed keys to activate
LED Keys
Fn + A: LED Pattern - Select previous
Fn + D: LED Pattern - Select next
Fn + Q: LED Pattern - Decrease scrolling speed (for animating patterns)
Fn + E: LED Pattern - Increase scrolling speed (for animating patterns)
Fn + Caps Lock: LED Pattern - Change scrolling direction (left to right, right to left, bottom to top, top to bottom, radial center to edge, radial edge to center)
Fn + W: LED - Increase brightness
Fn + S: LED - Decrease brightness
Fn + Tab: LED - Toggle breathing effect
Fn + X: LED - Toggle all LEDs off/on
Fn + Z: LED - Toggle mode (keys + edge, keys only, edge only, all...
About
How much of your day is spent typing on a keyboard? Discover the endless ways you can make this desk centerpiece a true expression of yourself.