Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 63

Issue #62 follow-up, developments, vendor & split database updates, 1977 Roland sequencer, etc.

dovenyi
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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