The advantage to the Heavy Grail when using aftermarket BLE controllers seems to be that there is more horizontal room to the left of the breakout PCB because there are no internal blocks for the riser feet getting in the way. Moreover, the Yang in particular cuts out a significant portion of the controller from the original footprint, making more room for a battery:
Also, from what I can see from streams where prototypes were taken apart, there doesn’t seem to be internal supports coming out from the bottom of the chassis either (unlike the HHKB Pro 2 itself). So, the battery can be longer, and probably a bit wider than 50mm, but needs to be thinner to accommodate the merino wool acoustic dampener (and any insulation material for safety). In the worst case, you could probably mod (i.e. butcher and cut) the provided acoustic dampener to salvage a few mm depth for the battery + insulate.
Hi @heavensfeel. As mentioned in the product page, our target shipping period remains sometime this summer. Machining of all of the housings has been complete for some time, half of the housings have been powder coated, and the injection molded switch plates are supposed to be complete by the end of the month. The last item to be complete will likely be the hardware parts packs and rear cover plates. I made some last-minute improvements to those to make assembly much easier, so production on those hasn’t started yet (but should be relatively fast). Hope that helps a bit.
Any details on what kinds of changes might have made assembly “much easier”? Perhaps something akin to the Heavy-9 pre-attached standoffs? I’m intrigued
Exactly that. The original plan involved a rather complicated mess of spacers and shims. I managed to reduce the number of loose hardware parts required for the breakout PCB (across both variants) from eight down to one!
Okay I think I’ve figured out all the mods I want to do when I get my Heavy Grail in. Now that summer is rolling in, I’m getting more excited as we approach!
Deskey pink or purple domes with Deskeys #3 rings. Interestingly, I see they released a new dome gasket that recovers the distance lost by their silencing rings. I’ll be receiving some of those shortly to try out and if they work out, that’ll be in my heavy grail as well!
For keycaps, I think it’s a no brainer I have to stick with my HiPro Keycaps
… which came with some truly stunning new photos of the Aperture finish! It looks fantastic on the Heavy Grail and my heart is wavering. Really brilliant photography work, I would love some insight into the process some day!
@batonnoir Round 2ish is a good way to put it. I had to order one large batch of switch plates to meet the MOQ of the injection molder, enough for two rounds of the Heavy Grail. And now that the housings from the original group buy are arriving to me this week (and since I continue to get emails about about making more literally every day), I figured I might as well get that second batch of housings in the pipeline so that we could hopefully ship this second batch before the end of the year.
In the meantime, we have a lot of work left on the original batch before we can ship. I think we’re going to ship these with the gaskets and switch plates installed, which means a lot of fiddly assembly work on our part, but I feel it’ll make the package look nicer on unboxing, so I’m leaning towards doing it. We’re also waiting on some small hardware parts to arrive, and I need to begin work on an assembly instructions video. So, although inspection and assembly begins this week, the first Grails likely won’t ship until the originally planned end-of-summer timeline. Many thanks for everyone’s continue interest in and support of what has been an enormous (and, frankly, somewhat daunting) project! I’m excited to have the finish line at least somewhere now on the perceptible horizon.
Here are some more visuals from the recent photo shoot. There is a pretty amazing video to go with them, which I’ll share here as soon as we finish it up this week.
My concept for this one was that it would be a sort of rocky lunar environment that would pair well with the texture and colors of Aperture. So we used lava rock as the practical background along with little bits of foil on a black fabric background with side-light shining on them, blurred out via wide aperture lens to crate a sort of dreamy effect. (This is how they created the starfield effect outside of windows on the sets of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) We then desaturated the reddish rocks to match the neutral color of the housing. I think it came off really well.
I looked up ‘eye candy’ afterwards, and realized it implied superficial beauty. So I take it back, it’s not just eye candy, it’s sophisticated inside-out and and I’m stoked for inauguration day And, the profile in the floating scene is perfetto
Also, I just realized that Shopify somehow reverted all my changes from yesterday, so the Grail may have appeared fully sold out again this morning. I’ve now fixed that.
Would it be possible to get a black one with a black plate as mentioned in these posts this time around? Very interested in that, I did not see that in time for the first pre-order
…unless it makes it much more expensive than the other aluminum ones as a custom thing, wish I could commit to one even if that is the case, but…
Hi Norbauer, what plates will come with the heavy grails that do not mention plates. I purchased the ap with pro 3 but I was curious about the plate since its not mentioned. Thanks for your work, it looks beautiful!
