Behind the Scenes of Issue 63

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

Would you like to contribute to this year's MK Advent Calendar? Here are the guidelines for authors, along with last year's edition for reference.

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:

(source)

–-

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

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Published on Mon 31st Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #63.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial