Interesting Finds & Heads-Ups

4.0mm travel! Nice. I love their switches so far but they’ve all been 3.3mm travel. This is a nice change-up

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Thanks for the heads up. I’ve enjoyed Blue Chiffon and Blue Sky switches from Aflion but aggressively shorter key-travel have kept me away from Matcha and Black Sesame so I’m doubly looking forward to Red Bean switches.

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Just checked their discord. I believe the switches will be available for purchase on Sunday.

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Invokeys Black Sesame switches are some of my favorites. I plopped them in my PC Envoy just because they matched the theme, but ended up building one of my favorite boards. Needless to say, these are staying put in that board and I turned around and ordered more.

These Red Bean switches sound like they will be fun. I have been looking enjoying PBT keycaps more and mire as of late. It will be interesting to see how they preform in a switch. :+1::+1:

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As far as I know there is currently one other switch on the market that uses PBT; the Everglide Moyu Black / Dark Jade. The housing is full PBT with a long-pole POM stem, and is one of the punchiest stock tactiles in the MX universe. I find them quite interesting but must warn you; they are way expensive at well over $1 per switch.

That’s part of what excites me about the Red Beans - they cost half as much but still bring PBT to the table, and in a switch similar to the Black Sesame. Won’t know if it’s good until I try it, but by all counts it has me interested.


Also - SwitchOddities has some new samples this weekend, mostly various iterations of the circle-shroud Kailh Box design.


Kailh Box Avocado Ice Cream Pro

I’m a big fan of this form-factor myself; it’s got all the environmental resistance benefits of the Box design plus North-facing / Cherry profile friendliness. No clue why all the Boxes don’t use that shape; the part of a normal Box housing that interferes has no actual purpose / covers no componentry like in a normal MX - but I am glad to see this so-far under-utilized design now being used for a bunch of new switches. I work in a dusty place, and switches like these will be ideal to kit-out the various machines’ control stations paired with rescue / salvage keebs like the NightFoxes with bad switches I picked up a while back.

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Interesting video. About production. Problems.
Solutions. And a lot of manual labor)

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I’m interested in these, too; also interested to see that Invokeys has a nice little sampler pack.

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Nice artisan holder in stock:

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Speaking of Matcha, there are “early bird deals” on AliExpress if you search around randomly, you can get 110 KTT Matcha medium-tactiles for $40 CAD, and quite frankly a number of other switches as well are 25% or more off.

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The AliExpress 11/11 sale will have €4 off every €20 so could be worth waiting a bit with ordering

Some codes for the sale: 12OT21 - $30/200, 11OT11 - $15/100, 11SALE8 - $8/50

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DCX BOGO sale going on for the next few days:

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Oh nice! Gonna have to wait for wed when my next pay hits but I’ve been eyeing up the Solarized & Garnet sets for a min now… Might have to pull the trigger on this sale!

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I saw that Weikav released an aluminum leaf spring Alice keyboard called Record, it is less than €100 barebone on aliexpress and probably even cheaper on taobao. Kind of crazy how many cheap aluminum keyboards that have come out lately

Weikav is the one that made Sugar65 which you can get barebone for €60 61.63€ 56% OFF|WEIKAV Sugar65 verdrahtete kunden spezifische mechanische Aluminium tastatur 66 keystype c Kabel dichtung struktur hotswap rgb hintergrund beleuchtete Gaming Tastatur| | - AliExpress

Both use their own software for customizing the keys. I would have ordered one if it supported QMK

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I ordered on Taobao. it’s really cheap there.
I ordered it because I have 3 pcb “Spring”.
And this Alice record is compatible with pcb.

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Class80 is back with an EC option this time!

So tempting.

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That green :heart_eyes:

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Graphic design student Nate Kearney made NKEY, a print magazine concept with some kbd.news interviews as its backbone. For clarity, this is not a real magazine (yet?) you could buy. Check out the kbd.news post about NKEY with some nice photos of the physical copy, and here is the pdf version for download.

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Same here was looking at them last night. That Cherry lip really make me want one!

I was really surprised by how nice my R1 beige kit was. Quite impressive. Perfect finish and the beige is the best retro beige I’ve seen

Don’t know about the EC version. Haven’t tried it. But I wasn’t all that impressed with my Corsa EC kit. I’ll stick with topre for now

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Yeah, I’ve been tempted by Niz kits too, but agree about just sticking to authentic Topre. I aint even a huge of that so something less & id probably never use it.

Edit: Still mulling over getting a Class 80 though!