Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the Scenes of Issue 63
Issue #62 follow-up, developments, vendor & split database updates, 1977 Roland sequencer, etc.
Published January 31, 2022
Hello everyone,
Developments
- Shop cake day highlighting. For vendors who can provide the exact date of their founding.
- IP geolocation in the vendor database (WIP). I'm having a hard time to implement this with IP6, most likely because I'm pretty sure I've just discovered some bugs in different software of the workflow.
- Donation button at the bottom of posts.
My first custom keyboard killed
ESD killed my very first proper (not cardboard :D) custom, the Storm46, I'd used for about three years.
As I touched the steel plate, there was an audible spark and the board went unresponsive.
When plugged in, the LED is still lighting but the device is not recognized and a hard reset has no effect either.
Fortunately, this is a handwired board and I'll be able to replace the Pro Micro quite easily.
This happened right in the morning when I sat down at my desk so I had to work the whole day with a standard keyboard, qwerty, and without thumb clusters.
Thank God, I had my old rubberdome laying around which I set up according to the Space FN concept back in 2018 so at least I had arrows and navigation on the home row with some frequent symbols.
What I really missed were: numbers on a layer, symbols in general – I arranged them quite logically for my programming tasks. Plus the offset of the bottom row in classic staggering was driving me crazy.
In addition, as much as I like Space FN – accessing an extra logical layer while holding the spacebar – holding a fullsize spacebar the whole day proved to be a much less comfortable solution compared to a 1u thumb key I use normally.
MoErgo kickstarter
Out of curiosity, I checked the Glove80 Kickstarter page an hour after the campaign went live and there were already 200 backers and half of the NZ$200,000 goal was pledged.
According to MoErgo's Stephen Cheng the goal was reached in 28 hours.
Vendor and split database updates
- SquashKB added, several profiles updated.
- Cerakey offered a $5 discount code (KBDNEWS)
- KumaMech renamed to Polartype.com.
In addition, I tried to work on the split keyboard database each day for a few minutes. Not a spectacular progress but I've tagged about 20-25 boards.
Donations
SplitKB is back as supporter! Thanks Thomas.
Reader suggested posts
Hey, it seems some people actually read my editorials.
After last week's post, a few emails landed in my inbox with suggestions, e.g. Karl Gresegger called my attention to his new Anna keyboard.
And John Park sent me a photo of a Roland sequencer from 1977 with some nice XDA-like keycaps:
–-
Well, that's it for today.
Thanks for reading and thanks for your support.
Feel free to ask and comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.
Cheers, Tamás
Published on Mon 31st Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #63.
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