Hi @dotdancohen, We're using Matias Quiet Click switches. We're definitely aware that different folks have different preferences and assuming we can make the numbers and logistics go, we hope to offer several other Matias Alps options including their louder variant.
The ÂTron isn't for sale. (Nor is the Fingerworks or any of the other weirder stuff.)
I'd love to hear/read more about the leather keycaps.
And yep, I've actually been documenting my prototypes on GH:)
Yep. It's not for everybody. This is the first thing we're making. If it goes well enough, we'll definitely be looking at a 'traditional' layout option.
We're not planning to make them PS/2 compatible out of the box, but we'd love firmware patches. (and or design help) to make them so. If you can do it with an Arduino Leonardo, you'll be able to do it with one of our Keyboards
Shenzhen was amazing. I need to spend more time there. But we need to get a little bit further with product design before I have a legitimate reason to go back.
We're planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign this fall. But we'd rather delay the campaign than launch something that we're not confident we can deliver and be proud of.
Initially, we intend to ship fully assembled & working keyboards. We believe pretty strongly that open hardware shouldn't require users to pick up a soldering iron. But we know that some folks _want_ a kit and we hope to get there eventually. If you're looking for something sort of like a Keyboardio keyboard in kit form, check out the ErgoDox on Massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/ergodox. (They require login before you can see things. It's unfortunate.)
There are definitely many awful MicroUSB ports out there, but there are also high-quality MicroUSB ports out there. The price difference between a cheap MicroUSB port and a high-end one is several orders of magnitude. As _specced_ they're supposed to be rated for more insertion cycles than MiniUSB.
We haven't made final component choices yet and this is something we're keenly aware of (and have debated internally). I'd be pissed if my keyboard's USB port failed. I'd be even more pissed if my customers' USB ports failed.
The durability we're looking for is somewhere between aluminum and balsa.
For the contours we're going for, the mechanical engineers and product folks we've been working with have assured us that we couldn't get away with stamping. It's pretty much die casting or milling. The numbers we've been getting for die-cast tooling just don't work out for the scale of production run we're expecting. I'd love to be wrong about all this.
The interior "key plate" and the bottom plate of the enclosure will, of course, be stamped aluminum.
Black anodized isn't the look we're going for but yes, there are a number of things we could to to differentiate it while sticking with the aluminum.
I probably wouldn't call it 'silly', though I have no problem with you doing so. I agree 100% that this is a niche product. I made one because I wanted one. We wouldn't be having a go of making a full production run if people didn't keep trying to buy our personal test units.
If you catch me calling it revolutionary, please make fun of me.
When the production keyboards ship, they'll ship with a cord. (The same MicroUSB port charges the battery for the bluetooth controller, programs the keyboard and lets the keyboard be a regular USB keyboard)
They'll also ship with firmware source code and a screwdriver;)
Yup. You'll also want to make sure to check the firmware for the bootloader on the microcontroller. But you'll be able to get to the ICSP header to do that.
I do a bit better when I've had a decent night's sleep and haven't spent the day on a trade-show floor. This was "Timothy finds Jesse standing around and asks him stuff" and not "interview with an agenda."
That being said, I totally need to learn a bit about concise speaking. Also, thanks:)
See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5449405&cid=47526135, but, uh. I never even vaguely meant to imply we'd be crazy enough to build keyswitches out of wood.
As of this week, the editors actually have it more correct than our website. We'd been prototyping in wood. In between when the video was shot last month and when this got posted, we finally got our first "finalish" aluminum prototype made. The aluminum prototype was what we talked about publicly on Highway1 (highway1.io) demo day and what we hoped to launch publicly. Once we had it in hand, we discovered a bunch of reasons we're not going to go with aluminum for production. (Mostly, cost, Weight, looking too much like an Apple product, weight, and weight.) We went back to the drawing board and believe we've got techniques, technologies and costs for commercial manufacture of a milled wood enclosure. We've been at OSCON this week, but should get the website updated soonish.
God no. Someone actually offered to sell us some endangered hardwood for the keyboards the other day. The plan is for something reasonably, pretty, reasonably hard, reasonably sustainable and reasonably inexpensive. N
What I did was to get a Jaunty _chroot_ running on the Kindle 2. The interesting bits were mostly around making X work and beating the 5-pad into submission.
3 seconds to iterate over the queue list sounds _broken_. I know you're no longer with that employer, but I'd encourage anybody else running into performance issues like that to bring them up on The rt-users mailinglist. There are plenty of folks who've probably seen and work through whatever it is that you're running into. And I'd much rather get scalability issues aired publicly in an rt-related forum where the community can work together to improve matters than have multiple sysadmins, DBAs and programmers struggle in silence.
Readers might want to take my comments with a grain of salt, as I'm RT's original author and chief architect. I routinely work with clients with RT instances that are well over 100,000 tickets. When using any large application at scale, you're going to need to invest time in performance tuning, but 100k tickets isn't "big" for an RT instance. With a single front end box and a single backend (untuned, but beefy) DB server, I've seen an RT server doing 10,000 tickets on a slow day, bursting to 25,000 with several million in the database.
I'd love to hear a bit more about the scaling problems you had over on rt-devel@lists.bestpractical.com. We have end users (some of them paying customers, but plenty of them not) with well over a million tickets in their RT instances without any sort of performance problem.
And I'd certainly love to see patches for anything you had to do to get performance up to snuff. (Since, well, we'd certainly like to improve things if users are running into trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh. We'll have a look. Thanks!
Hi @dotdancohen, We're using Matias Quiet Click switches. We're definitely aware that different folks have different preferences and assuming we can make the numbers and logistics go, we hope to offer several other Matias Alps options including their louder variant.
The ÂTron isn't for sale. (Nor is the Fingerworks or any of the other weirder stuff.)
I'd love to hear/read more about the leather keycaps.
And yep, I've actually been documenting my prototypes on GH :)
Yep. It's not for everybody. This is the first thing we're making. If it goes well enough, we'll definitely be looking at a 'traditional' layout option.
Bamboo is certainly on the list of wood-like things we're considering.
We're not planning to make them PS/2 compatible out of the box, but we'd love firmware patches. (and or design help) to make them so. If you can do it with an Arduino Leonardo, you'll be able to do it with one of our Keyboards
Shenzhen was amazing. I need to spend more time there. But we need to get a little bit further with product design before I have a legitimate reason to go back.
We're planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign this fall. But we'd rather delay the campaign than launch something that we're not confident we can deliver and be proud of.
Initially, we intend to ship fully assembled & working keyboards. We believe pretty strongly that open hardware shouldn't require users to pick up a soldering iron. But we know that some folks _want_ a kit and we hope to get there eventually. If you're looking for something sort of like a Keyboardio keyboard in kit form, check out the ErgoDox on Massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/ergodox. (They require login before you can see things. It's unfortunate.)
There are definitely many awful MicroUSB ports out there, but there are also high-quality MicroUSB ports out there. The price difference between a cheap MicroUSB port and a high-end one is several orders of magnitude. As _specced_ they're supposed to be rated for more insertion cycles than MiniUSB.
We haven't made final component choices yet and this is something we're keenly aware of (and have debated internally). I'd be pissed if my keyboard's USB port failed. I'd be even more pissed if my customers' USB ports failed.
There are a few such sites, but http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/ is probably the most amazing of em.
That's correct. If you pop open a Maltron, there's a gorgeous web of fine copper wire. :)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/8413586842 is a photo my friend Mark took of my Maltron and Kinesis with the bottoms off.
The durability we're looking for is somewhere between aluminum and balsa.
For the contours we're going for, the mechanical engineers and product folks we've been working with have assured us that we couldn't get away with stamping. It's pretty much die casting or milling. The numbers we've been getting for die-cast tooling just don't work out for the scale of production run we're expecting. I'd love to be wrong about all this.
The interior "key plate" and the bottom plate of the enclosure will, of course, be stamped aluminum.
Black anodized isn't the look we're going for but yes, there are a number of things we could to to differentiate it while sticking with the aluminum.
I probably wouldn't call it 'silly', though I have no problem with you doing so. I agree 100% that this is a niche product. I made one because I wanted one. We wouldn't be having a go of making a full production run if people didn't keep trying to buy our personal test units.
If you catch me calling it revolutionary, please make fun of me.
When the production keyboards ship, they'll ship with a cord. (The same MicroUSB port charges the battery for the bluetooth controller, programs the keyboard and lets the keyboard be a regular USB keyboard)
They'll also ship with firmware source code and a screwdriver ;)
...as it happens, I got to play around with a current model Bloomberg keyboard the other day. It's a scissor-switch keyboard assembled in Mexico.
Yup. You'll also want to make sure to check the firmware for the bootloader on the microcontroller. But you'll be able to get to the ICSP header to do that.
I do a bit better when I've had a decent night's sleep and haven't spent the day on a trade-show floor. This was "Timothy finds Jesse standing around and asks him stuff" and not "interview with an agenda."
That being said, I totally need to learn a bit about concise speaking. Also, thanks :)
See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5449405&cid=47526135, but, uh. I never even vaguely meant to imply we'd be crazy enough to build keyswitches out of wood.
Hi, jesse of keyboardio here.
As of this week, the editors actually have it more correct than our website. We'd been prototyping in wood. In between when the video was shot last month and when this got posted, we finally got our first "finalish" aluminum prototype made. The aluminum prototype was what we talked about publicly on Highway1 (highway1.io) demo day and what we hoped to launch publicly. Once we had it in hand, we discovered a bunch of reasons we're not going to go with aluminum for production. (Mostly, cost, Weight, looking too much like an Apple product, weight, and weight.) We went back to the drawing board and believe we've got techniques, technologies and costs for commercial manufacture of a milled wood enclosure. We've been at OSCON this week, but should get the website updated soonish.
God no. Someone actually offered to sell us some endangered hardwood for the keyboards the other day. The plan is for something reasonably, pretty, reasonably hard, reasonably sustainable and reasonably inexpensive. N
I designed this just a couple weeks ago:
http://blog.fsck.com/2013/01/pinkies-and-your-brain.html
I've been using it and am fairly happy with it.
What I did was to get a Jaunty _chroot_ running on the Kindle 2. The interesting bits were mostly around making X work and beating the 5-pad into submission.
Longstaff,
3 seconds to iterate over the queue list sounds _broken_. I know you're no longer with that employer, but I'd encourage anybody else running into performance issues like that to bring them up on The rt-users mailinglist. There are plenty of folks who've probably seen and work through whatever it is that you're running into. And I'd much rather get scalability issues aired publicly in an rt-related forum where the community can work together to improve matters than have multiple sysadmins, DBAs and programmers struggle in silence.
Readers might want to take my comments with a grain of salt, as I'm RT's original author and chief architect. I routinely work with clients with RT instances that are well over 100,000 tickets. When using any large application at scale, you're going to need to invest time in performance tuning, but 100k tickets isn't "big" for an RT instance. With a single front end box and a single backend (untuned, but beefy) DB server, I've seen an RT server doing 10,000 tickets on a slow day, bursting to 25,000 with several million in the database.
yarbel,
I'd love to hear a bit more about the scaling problems you had over on rt-devel@lists.bestpractical.com. We have end users (some of them paying customers, but plenty of them not) with well over a million tickets in their RT instances without any sort of performance problem.
And I'd certainly love to see patches for anything you had to do to get performance up to snuff. (Since, well, we'd certainly like to improve things if users are running into trouble.
Best,
Jesse (RT's chief catherder)
http://onebag.com/ is a _fantastic_ resource.