Behind the Scenes of Issue 122

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 122

Support Ergogen, quick news, new shops, discounts, meetups, developments, etc.

dovenyi
Published May 15, 2023

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 140K readers.

Hey y'all,

This week was all about pretty uncommon projects, other than the usual MX/Choc stuff: buckling spring boards, EC split, and I'd say the GrabShell may define a whole new genre of input devices as well.

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #122), a weekly roundup of this DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi – that's me. If you are new to this, you can read how this started out and what this is all about nowadays. If you like what you see, subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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All these cool projects after skipping posting for a few days due to the lack of adequate content. But there's a lot to do behind the scenes even when you can't see new posts coming. I'd like to give a big shout-out to all the readers who have contacted me with suggestions and heads-ups last week.

Contributors of the week: Carl – for his exemplary work on informing me about the zFrontier meetup with an impeccably filled out form and bonus custom infograph. ;) Thanks Down for the elaborated email on the weird matrix naming conventions. Charlieplexing for the win! (And sorry for the late reply. That's all part of the game while I get paid for something completely different than answering keyboard related mails.) And MoErgo's Stephen made me aware that I have a largely abandoned and outdated keycap profile page on golem.hu (click at your own risk). It's pretty unusable in its current form so I'll have to completely rework that one.

Other than that, I write probably dozens if not hundreds of DMs and emails per week to kind ladies and gents (mostly gents, unfortunately) from all around the world, begging for more info on their projects, asking for discounts in shops (for you ofc, I haven't really bought anything in a year except vintage stuff), and I also keep annoying meetup organizers to make the database as comprehensive as possible. So special thanks to all of you who take the effort and reply to my inquiries ;) – I'm pretty sure half of my emails land in spam folders.

Support Ergogen!

Dénes Bán aka MrZealot, developer and curator of the Ergogen project, made donations available on github, shared also on ergogen.xyz. Consider supporting Dénes and his work so he can focus on keyboards instead of all the other pointless stuff keeping him busy. ;)

Avid kbd.news readers may remember that we crossed paths last summer in his home city and shot a couple of professional glamour photos. Here is one of them to boost your support and generosity:

Pic:

(Damn, I had no idea this photo will be used for fundraising, otherwise we could have seized a bunch of cute puppies and kittens or even kidnap some toddlers to help us empty your wallets.)

Quick news

Hmm. What rare constellation made the Ergodox/Redox design to be resurrected from its ashes, and right in four different incarnations! Neodox by hainguyenac, Moondox by pca006132, ExtraDox v2 by blastrock0, and there's also the buckling spring one by modelfkeyboards.com.
Games/animations: ergohaven brought snagimmo's Space Invaders to the K:02. typelit.io – a different kind of training. QMK OLED sugar.
SylivanKenobi added case and plate files to the T-Rex repo (related post).
Some cool closed source projects last week were: chocBoard, Toimia, also nana's SUIKA.
And supposedly there are two new all-POM low-pro switches from Kailh and Lofree. MX-compatible, so along the Choc v2 lines. I'm not really into switches so can't judge how revolutionary this new product line is. POM is undoubtedly cool, and I'm sure the Ghost (linear) and Phantom (tactile) switches will be fine as well. However, all I've seen is renders and Lofree directed me to this page.
Omg, long forgotten KAT keysets are getting manufactured at last. I just got a notification from mykeyboard.eu about a set I ordered back in 2020. It's been processed, waiting for shipping.

Vendor database

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this week:

Loobed Switches (Dallas) added, and Chris offered you a 5% discount (code: KBDNEWS).
MMkeyboard (China) added, and Mood was kind enough to offer you a $10 discount (one use per customer, $200 min order).
GrabShell (Japan) added.
Joe from Brand new Model F keyboards reached out to me. Check out his awesome project if you are tired of MX switches or simply are flirting with buckling spring or beam spring keyboards.
Centorek now ships globally.

Meetup database

New entries and updates to the meetup database:

zFMeetUp 2023 organized by zFrontier (Shanghai, May 20). (Thanks Carl!)
Next Dallas Mini Meet will be held on May 21.
Tokyo 4% (June 3).
Tickets for the Milwaukee Meetup are now available ($15, June 17).
SFxMK 2023 in San Francisco (July 8). (Thanks Furion!)
Keeb Life 2023 will be held in Pasadena, CA (Sept 2). Save the date. More TBA.

It's cool to see that this little database is growing, with 19 upcoming events as of typing this. Thanks to all the organizers who reach out to me so I don't have to roam the uttermost circles of discord hell for new announcements.

As always, this meetup database is both a calendar and an archive so feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Donors

New donation came from: Ben M. Thanks a lot!
Motfalcon has increased his monthly recurring donation. Thanks for your continuous support!
And many thanks to the regular donors plus everyone who supported this project in any of its development stages.

Maintaining this site takes much more energy and time than my fulltime job does. (According to the Reddit Recap stats that's 100 hours per month on Reddit only.) If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Developments

New developments:

Small tweaks in the meetup database which will make its maintenance much easier.
Fixings some tags, but there are still some typos and inconsistencies.
Some updates to the keycap profile page, but I'll have to rework it from scratch.
No progress with the dashboard I mentioned last time.

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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by. As always: Keep learning and building!

Until next time, Tamás

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Published on Mon 15th May 2023. Featured in KBD #122.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial