It’s been a long road for Wooting, a tiny outfit creating the One analog mechanical keyboard, but the group’s journey from crowdfunding campaign to the distribution of a final product is almost over. On March 16, the Wooting One went into mass production.

Right away, there was one issue--although work began in the factory on QA and early assembly on the keyboards, the actual switches hadn’t yet arrived. The next day (today, March 17), the switches arrived in the morning, and assembly proceeded. However, once the first set of keyboards rolled off the assembly line and they checked the analog switch performance of completed units, they found that a few of the keys were registering as “NG,” or “not good.”



In a video, the Wooting team noted that tomorrow (March 18), they should be able to drill down on the problem and continue mass production.

Assuming there are no more hiccups, early backers of the campaign will get their keyboards beginning in April.

We say “beginning” in April, because Wooting said that there are some factors impacting delivery schedules. In a blog post, Wooting noted that it will take a week to complete the entire mass production run--again, that started March 16--and everything else follows from there:

Then we’re bringing it over by airplane for distribution. Once it’s sent out to you we will share a tracking number with you. Depending on your country, backer level and the local delivery guy (he might like one for himself), expect it at your doorstep anywhere in April.

In the time since Wooting first published the above (February 21) and now, the company has finished its components check, making sure the keycap legend printing alignment isn’t just being eyeballed by the manufacturer (it was before!), checking top plate anodization, and doing a final check on the switches.

Wooting revealed that its configuration software for the Wooting One will be called the Wootility. It’s based on a framework called Electron that relies on HTML, CSS, and JS, and it’s therefore cross-platform. Well, sort of--the configuration part works on PC, Mac, and Linux, but the analog sensing part is trickier. Wooting said that you need to add Xinput drivers, and although there are open source versions available, there’s no guarantee that they’ll work perfectly.

Wootility has been in the hands of alpha and beta testers for a while, and we presume it will be ready to go when the One starts shipping in a week.

