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)...
I Think My Switch Is Stuck! - The Tale of Cherry MX Locks
Over the years of collecting mechanical keyboard switches, I’ve been lucky enough to have encountered dozens upon dozens of rare and unique ones that have stuck in my mind to this day. Prototypes, factory errors, and even a few switches so rare that there is literally zero documentation about them anywhere in the world all fill that personal list from top to bottom. However, I realize that talking about switches so far outside of most people’s reaches, and even sometimes my own grasp, doesn’t make for the most exciting of articles about switches. To this newest generation of keyboard enthusiasts, though, there is one pretty rare MX-style switch which has made its way to the top of everyone’s “must try” lists – Cherry MX Locks. These often undiscussed and even more rarely seen switches are something that few people have seen and even fewer have had the chance to try at a meetup before. However, the list of people who really know how these unique Cherry switches work is even shorter...
So in my previous write-up, while highlighting the benefits of alternative and custom layouts, I declared without much evidence that QWERTY is not that bad at all, and also that it is in the top 2% of all the possible layouts. Well, like so many times in life: it depends.
I did my original research many years ago - the exact value was in fact 1.82% -, but I forgot to mention that this is only valid in a special case: using my personal corpus and ruleset. It makes sense since back in the day I did this to support the design process of my own custom keymaps.
Anyway, it was high time to redo my original experiment, dive in this topic a bit deeper, and reveal the logic and method behind my calculations. Spoiler alert: I was wrong! Or was I? ;)
QWERTY
Everyone knows QWERTY I guess. Christopher Sholes, Remington 2 typewriter, preventing jamming of type bars, path dependence, whatever. I'm not going to cover it here, check this previous write-up of mine if you are interested...
I don’t think this is an article.
I’m pretty sure it’s the beginning of a book.
The "technology" section of every thrift store is a potential treasure trove. Swap meets, estate sales... they're the same. I honestly enjoy sifting through stacks of typewriters, radios, turntables and dusty old keyboards... hunting for treasure. That's what has led me to ask my friends in the hobby a pair of simple but nuanced questions… what’s your dream thrift store find and what’s your holy grail?
It turns out, that for many, that’s the same question. For a lot of people in this hobby, finding the perfect board for you happens at some point, and rather than staring at your collection of boards on the wall, or continuing to buy keyboards until your room looks like Wall-E’s trailer…
Instead, mature keyboard hobbyists tend to do a number of things:
Sell/trade artisan keycaps
Purchase keycap sets
Sell or trade rare/nice (and sometimes new) keyboards to keep things fresh
Most of us haven’t...
Hall Effect: What is a Hall Effect switch and will it turn you into a gaming god?
TL;DR: Nope, but there are reasons why you may want to use a Hall Effect Keyboard.
Hall Effect switches are the newest trend in mechanical keyboard switches. From Gateron to Geon, switch manufacturers are starting to release HE switches. With Wooting at the forefront and seemingly the best implementation of Hall Effect technology, many other brands seem to be playing catch-up. We’ve seen releases like the RAKKA, BOOG75, DrunkDeer, and MOD007 HE start to stir up competition. But do you need another keyboard? Is this one going to be the end all be all for you? Is HE Endgame? If you’re like me, a keyboard enthusiast, your answers will probably be: no(yes), no, and no. Do I think that an HE board deserves a spot in your collection? Maybe… Let’s dive into the latest technological update to mechanical switches in a long time, and you can make that decision for yourself.
First, we need to know...
Figure 1: This is the keyboard of someone (0range) who clearly knows how to ask proper questions.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lurking around the channels of a couple of different entry level keyboard forums and I have to admit that the experience is quite bleak. I’m not saying this because of “toxicity” or people being given wrong information, rather I see so many people’s questions going unanswered… and to be honest they’re kind of to blame for it. While I recognize that not everyone coming freshly into the keyboard space enters it with the same level of inquisitiveness that I did when I first joined back in 2017, these questions going unanswered really feel way under-thought or over-thought compared to where I was. On one hand, you get questions like this:
What is best gaming keyboard?
And on the other hand, you get questions like this:
Hi, there everyone! I am just now starting to look into mechanical keyboards as an avid gamer and I need some help in...
I must have watched this GMMK Pro pre-sale build video from a YouTuber named IO Sam a dozen times before I pulled out my wallet and pre-ordered it.
In retrospect, I learned a great deal about building keyboards from Sam’s straightforward, professional delivery. I watched and re-watched sections I didn’t understand, and certain phrases and moments in the video stuck with me in ways where I still think about them. Especially at 23:10, when he compliments the MT3 White on Black keycaps with an actual chef’s kiss, locks eyes with the camera and says “Perfecto.” (I still do that whenever I put MT3 WOB on a board.)
In that video, IO Sam introduced me to DROP, when he referenced the MT3 WOB’s and the GMK Kaiju keycaps that he set the Glorious GMMK Pro up with. I was in love with the look and feel of the MT3 profile. (I still am, as you can read in my previous article “In defense of MT3”) As a life-long Godzilla fanatic, I fell head over heals for GMK Kaiju. In the latter parts...
Fear and loathing on a PCB
At a recent keyboard meetup I was talking to someone very new to the hobby and they said that they bought a board and were surprised to discover that it was not hotswap. They were really intimidated by the idea of soldering their switches into their keyboard. Turns out, for some people, whipping out a blazing hot metal stick and possibly wrecking your expensive purchase gets them jittery.
All kidding aside, for the first year or so in the hobby, I purchased exclusively hotswap keyboards, avoiding soldering for a couple reasons. Firstly, I didn’t want to commit to any one switch. I liked clicky a lot early on (still do if I’m being honest) but I saw that the folks who had been in the hobby for longer moved away from clicky, and I predicted accurately that I too would do the same. Secondly, I was just coming to terms with what it cost to buy and build a keyboard, and soldering seemed like an unnecessary risk.
I can trace my initial...
Layout Optimization Best Practices: The Corpus (Part 1)
In this series we are designing our own custom keymaps, logical layouts, you name it. We’ve laid the groundwork by looking into how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers (SpaceFN), and also the huge potential of alternative layouts and custom keymaps. Today, we take the first step in designing your ultimate keymap by exploring our options for compiling a corpus.
What's a corpus? Essentially, it's just a fancy term for a big chunk of text. In this context it means a usually large collection of textual data used directly or indirectly as an input for our layout optimization algorithms. Often literally a single text file.
Why does it matter to you? Because a well-crafted, personalized corpus is crucial for keymap wizards. If you're aiming to design your own custom logical layout, the corpus plays a key role in determining the language statistics that reflect your typing habits, thus the outcome of the optimization. These statistics, which we extract through analysis of...
Typing out all the Harry Potter books would be crazy, right? What would be the point? Seems like a weird flex even by keyboard enthusiast standards. Yep, that's right. Typing it out once makes no sense. That's why I'm going to type out the books a few million times! For the benefit of humanity and especially of you, fellow keymap wizards.
This demonstration of the power of alternative/custom layouts is a shortened version of the original article at kbd.news. Given the huge extent of this topic, we can barely scratch the surface here so consider this write-up a mere teaser.
Imagine you are an aspiring writer with a brilliant idea, just about to start typing out your magnum opus, staring at a yet empty document on your screen. Cursor blinking, annoying orphan relatives locked up in the cupboard under the stairs.
Your story, about a young boy who ends up saving the world, is quite complete. You "just" have to type out heaps of your manuscripts and notes: about 6.5 million...
Layout optimization best practices: sources of your personal corpus (part 2)
Welcome back to our series on designing custom keymaps! After looking into how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers, and the potential of custom keymaps, last time we took the first real step by examining your options for compiling a corpus.
As a recap: The corpus is simply a big chunk of text. We use this collection of textual data, often a single text file, to characterize your typing habits (calculating various language statistics), and feed it directly or indirectly as an input into layout optimization algorithms – to find the optimal keymap for you!
Today we’ll expand on this idea by exploring your options if, like me, you prefer a personalized corpus rather than grabbing some general (and mostly irrelevant) data available online.
Image 1: Letter frequencies – the most basic use of corpora – in this very post
We've seen that a well-crafted, personalized corpus plays a key role in determining the outcome of the optimization process. We've also explored...
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 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 - All Drop V2 keyboards, SENSE75, and CSTM80
Hold FN + listed keys to activate
LED Keys
Fn + W: LED Brightness Increase
Fn + S: LED Brightness Decrease
Fn + E: LED Animation Speed Increase
Fn + D: LED Animation Speed Decrease
Fn + R: LED Hue Increase
Fn + F: LED Hue Decrease
Fn + T: LED Saturation Increase
Fn + G: LED Saturation Decrease
Fn + Q: LED Toggle (All, Keys, Edge, Off)
Fn + A: LED Next Pattern
Fn + Z: LED Mono Color Mode
Fn + X: LED Breathing Effect
Fn + C: LED Rainbow Mode
Fn + V: LED Rainbow Pinwheel Mode
Keyboard Option Keys
Fn + N: Toggle keyboard 6KRO/NKRO (Default state 6KRO)
Fn + LCtrl + O: Windows /...