A bunch of new stuff at SwitchOddities, including lots of low-profile switches and a fair amount of Hall-effect ones, too.
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Although not an unsculpted set, the GSA Retro keycaps showed that tasteful (in this case, retro) designs with a coherent theme (lack of modern dye colours) can work well.
I hope to see more of this kind of thing in the future.
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Agreed that their first reverse die sub attempt were not good (I have Kat Arctic and Kam Wraith to confirm that).
But for Kat Refined their reverse die sub have been absolutely flawless to me.
But I waited for it more than 2 years.
They look to have progressed for the delivery time as well, and even provide in stock keycaps on their website (the Kat Operator designed by Biip is looking great btw, a mix of dual shot and die sub )
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Not a keyboard but I feel like this might be of interest to some of us.
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I would agree with this absolutely from 2021 to 2022, but they seem to have fixed a lot of the issues from that era. Considering what a fiasco they were at the time (both of their own doing and terrible communication plus global supply chain issues during covid), I can’t fault anyone for being leery of them now.
I’m in this boat now too. The dyesub and reverse dyesub on KAM Superuser is pretty much flawless on the kits I received; legends are sharp and correctly aligned and both the legend and cap colors are consistent. I credit a good bit of this to FreshFromTheGrave (aka Steven at NovelKeys) and his attention to to detail, but the actual manufacturing quality shouldn’t be discounted.
It did take 2.5 years to arrive and the spacebar kit packaging left the tops slightly scuffed, so not perfect. But I’d roll the dice with Keyreative again at this stage of their development.
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The Haverworks Theseus75 is “a balanced 75% split mechanical keyboard kit” with “magnetic interlocking” and a LEMO cable connector between the two halves. Board mounts via a hybrid poron and silicone gasket system and the whole kit weighs in at a very chonk 6.44 lbs (2.923 kg). It looked vaguely familiar and then I realized I read about it a year ago over on @dovenyi’s KBD.news article.
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What I would have given to get a premium, aluminum split board. Then I had to get all fiscally responsible. Curse my rotten timing!
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Cool.
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I am happy to see that ZMK Studio has a target release date.
Really the only thing missing to ZMK was a GUI like VIA/VIAL to configure your keys.
The only negative is that this will add even more fragmentation, with 3 different apps (VIA, VIAL and ZMK Studio) to rempa your keys.
Would be nice to have in the future a GUI application that can handle all 3 protocols…
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Yeah, it would be so cool if a company like Keychron cared to work on this. They sell keyboards that run QMK, including wireless ones. It would make sense from a technical perspective to adopt ZMK for wireless, and they could keep it user-friendly for their broad customer base with an all-in-one configurator GUI.
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Same! I mean, I keep backsliding, but still! It has magnets! (Which work way better than I expected; check 18:35 in the YT stream below.)
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The battery efficiency on ZMK sounds impossibly good; I’m very curious to see how it performs in real-world conditions. I thought the CannonKeys claim of 800 hours on a 200 mAh battery was a typo, but it seems to be repeated throughout:
At ZMK efficiencies, that 4000 mAh Keychron battery would last 16000 hours on a single charge (or almost two years of 24-7 usage). Four hours of use on 1 mAh. Incredible!
Don’t forget QMK Toolbox! All I can think of is this old XKCD comic about competing standards:
The alt-text joke for the comic really points to its age and should resonate here on KT: “Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we’ve all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.”
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FWIW, I’ve never been able to get that kind of battery use with ZMK in the real world. I’m been using a 100 mAh battery and a nice!nano v2 controller for over two years, and I get maybe ~4 days of use out of a charge. That’s without an off switch, but the controller goes into deep sleep after 10 minutes idle.
I’ve always wondered if there’s something I’ve missed in my config, or if it’s something about the nice!nano, but haven’t been able to improve my experience so far.
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That seems much more in line with what I would expect. Four days on 100 mAh is still impressive IMO, especially when compared to non-ZMK boards.
My only BT board is the DR-70F which has a 6400 mAh battery, uses “LDN” for configuration software (which I haven’t touched at all), and it uses about 1% of battery capacity per hour of active use. Which is fine? Most of the time, I use it in wired mode so it doesn’t bother me, but there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in wireless efficiency.
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Haha!
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Vala has a Fourth of July Sale today with 50% off most items. They’re doing a 40% off sale from July 5-9 too.
Who broke the keyboard? 
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This does not account for the fact that LiPo cells self-discharge…
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Designing for ultra low power is hard. Incidentally, I have been researching this topic this week for a microcontroller project not related to keyboards.
One of the best references I came across, offering a lot of insights, measurements and tips is this blog posting by Nick Gammon entitled “Power saving techniques for microprocessors”.
One thing that comes to mind, is the use of inferior, more energy wasting, power regulators used on some of the clone boards.
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