Week in Keyboards #3

Community

Geekhack Outage

The first news should be the outage of geekhack. It is currently down and many resources are still unavailable. At first it was a DoS attack and not their hosting has bailed. This is the reason for the longer than expected outage. With this outage speculation around the funding of geekhack has come into question and it is possible donations might be needed to get everything running again. As a result of this, a t-shirt donation drive has been set up by fohat.

With the outage people have been left without information and communications that are all a part of geekhack. This could be a useful lesson to show people cannot rely on one service. It is a huge part of the community and the downtime is felt greatly.

T-shirt Sale

Geekhack Information twitter. If anything actually changes it will be posted on this twitter.

Keyboards

ErgoDox Infinity

Delays have effected the ErgoDox infinity and it will not be shipping on the date originally intended.

Alex Peterkin:

I’ll work with Logistics and try to get an approximation for a new time line, but I can say for sure that this will not be shipping in 4 days as originally estimated. Thank you for being patient.

This seems to be the result of being generally behind in production and prototyping. A later update suggests they are getting closer to having high quality prototype. Although it has had a rocky start I am still interested to see how it turns out, even if it isn’t the product I was hoping for.

The missing chip has arrived at the PCB fab and we should be getting a prototype from facility A before the end of next week with another prototype coming from facility B shortly after.

Once we verify that these are working and up to the high standards of the community, we will start mass production. Sourcing all the components and assembly should be fairly quick and we should have these in our warehouse within a month of prototype approval.

As soon as the units the arrive at our warehouse the bulk order will get broken down and individual orders will be readied for shipment. All told this puts the new estimated ship date at mid-August.

Thank you all again for being so patient. This is a major undertaking and we want to assure a very high level of quality before shipping these out

Dedicated Osu Keyboard

Osu is a rhythm game and that is as much as I know. But this is a dedicated two key + plus a pause button keyboard, strictly for playing Osu. So if you are a hardcore Osu player this could be the perfect keyboard for you.

Buy it here Although shop owner is currently on Hiatus.

Demonstration Video This video justifies the existence.

EASARS RGB Keyboard

This is another full RGB keyboard supporting 16 million colours. It is said to use switches that have “50 million life cycle” but no actual mention of cherry. It supports colour profiles and macros and possibly full programmability. The official page says “Customized programming setting can be controlled freely.” but I expect a customisable Fn layer. Again this is another example of a strange keycap font choice.

Ducky Blue One

This appears to just be a backlit full size keyboard. An alternative to those who do not care for RGB but like backlighting. I was unable to find any other product page than the mechanicalkeyboards.com listing.

Quickfire Xti

Yet another almost RGB backlit keyboard. This one however is a bit more appealing. It is full-size has a removable cable, 35 backlighting colours and macro support. All of this puts it on the level of the Ducky Shine 4. My favourite part of this keyboard is the font. The gamecuben font has been ditched, which has been a huge annoyance to many people in the past. Overall the design of this keyboard does not scream “gamer peripheral”. This makes it my favourite upcoming stock keyboard at the moment. Ducky has the next place with the Ducky Shine 5, with its double pcb.

TK78 Rev C. Prototypes Ordered

SentrentPC is creating a new keyboard design that I don’t think has been done before or is at least very uncommon. It is a 60% with a numpad. Although this might be considered strange, I think this design definitely fills a need. Many complaints with the 60% is the lack of numpad, navigation keys and arrow keys. But the arrow keys and navigation keys can be easily implemented on Fn layers but people still like a physical numpad. This is not a problem I find as I rarely use the numpad. However, I still appreciate this design. Most information is currently on geekhack so now unavailable.

Update With Additional Information

This is straight from SentrantPC so I don’t feel it needs editing.

We just ordered the PCB. It’s a daughterboard plus main board, with the daughterboard being for the 2 port USB hub. Plate will be sandblasted aluminum and case will be milled from aluminum and both anodized to gunmetal grey. The plate is cool as it supports many different layouts (linked to the layouts supported below). PCB also supports all those layouts. GB date is looking to be August 1st and limited to 30 units. A GB for the version with the numbed on the left side will be done I’m hoping around September with it limited to 20 units and also 20 units of the right version as well. You can buy it with Plate only, PCB only, plate/PCB, case only, kit, or assembles with or w/ out keycaps. base price for kit is looking to be around $260.

Supported Layouts

From this information it looks to be a very promising new 60ish% I hope everything goes well for this GB.

TextBlade Has Not Shipped

For those not initiated with the project, the TextBlade is quite an interesting portable keyboard. Although not quite mechanical like many keyboard enthusiasts are used to, the form factor makes it interesting. It is incredibly small and therefore portable. Although the switches are a new design they do look interesting and I would like to reserve judgement on the feel before I get one. Another benefit is the huge range of layouts that will be available. Layouts such as Colemak and Dvorak as well as language variants such as Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, Nordic and Danish.

This may seem like an ambitious project and the delays they are encountering seem concurrent with this. It is around 4 months passed ship date, but a recent forum update suggests that in two weeks on the 10th of July they will be getting a new prototype and if it is ok then some will be shipped. Although I am saying 10th of July, they said Friday and did not commit to a date.

Cherry MX 6.0 Available on Amazon UK

Now available on Amazon UK for £156.43. I have one and will be putting out a review at some point.

Keycaps

Leopold Dyesubs Available Through Widebasket

They became available shortly after last week’s post. But here are the links:

After the comical update a couple of weeks ago it seems that production is moving forward. At this stage the keycaps should either be with massdrop or shipped by massdrop.

We spoke with Signature Plastics earlier today and they’re wrapping up the final production steps as we speak. They are aiming to have the order shipped out to us from their facility within the next day or so.

Once the group’s order arrives our warehouse, we’ll break up the bulk shipment into individual orders and ship them off to you as soon as possible.

Our warehouse is prepared to get your package shipped out the moment it arrives. Thanks for your patience and expect an update from us on 7/6 or sooner.

This was always an ambitious GB because it was the first from GMK that was totally new. I believe the colours used are not offered by GMK but were created for this GB. GMK has run into a supply delay which in turn will delay the ship date.

We spoke with GMK earlier today and they informed us of an unexpected delay from one of their material suppliers. The last remaining shipment of the material needed for our production order to complete will arrive by end of next week. Unfortunately, this mean the order will only be ready for us to pick up from GMK’s German facility by July 21.

Our freight partner in Germany is on standby, and they will be ready to pick up the shipment from GMK within moment notice. Our warehouse staff have also all been informed of the urgent nature of everyone’s orders in this drop. Needless to say, we are all prepared to get these out to everyone as soon as the production is completed.

We understand this delay is undesirable and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. Knowing what we do, we think the keycap set is definitely worth the wait and up to the communities lofty expectations, but if you prefer not to wait and would like to cancel the order instead please submit a ticket via our Support page (https://www.massdrop.com/support), and we will take care of your request right away.

Thanks for your patience and expect an update from us by the end of the day Pacific Time on 7/22.