Behind the Scenes of Issue 76

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 76

Duplex matrix feedback, round-robin matrix research. New donors, April stats, upcoming KBD.NEWS scholarship(?).

dovenyi
Published May 2, 2022

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

Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #76), 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, you can subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Duplex matrix feedback

I got a lot of feedback on the duplex matrix write-up on various platforms. Reddit, Keebtalk, Deskthority, both public and PMs.

Even Ikeji contacted me, who btw has probably the best content on this topic (in Japanese) and whose posts I used as a reference for that "Japanese" duplex matrix write-up – or double matrix how he calls it.

This time he assisted me providing another lot of links pointing to his documentation of weird matrices.

Understandably, most people asked about ghosting last time, and knowledgeable users pointed out the voltage drop part of this method.

I tried to address this issue in more details in this week's Round-robin matrix write-up.

Truchet tile generator

I've wasted way too much time on the amazing Truchet patterns and cellular automata this week. :D

I'm more of a server-side guy so created everything in PHP but will try to rewrite my code into JavaScript for you.

New supporters

Thanks to Paul Kischlat who supported this project last week.

And as you can probably tell by looking at the sidebar, PCBWay donated a visible amount of money too, which put them right at the first place of the donor list.

I can't really recall how this cooperation started or by whom it was initiated at all because I'm in a constant (sometimes chaotic) correspondence with various vendors and manufacturers to secure some discount codes for you.

And sometimes, they simply find that beside supporting you (the general reader base) they would support my project too.

So from all the PCB manufacturers I reached out to, PCBWay is the first donor who supports KBD.NEWS. Newsletter fee is covered for some time now…

And of course they offered a coupon code for you too. So when ordering from them, feel free to use the KBDNEWS code to redeem $5.

April stats

About page updated with April stats.

I totally forget to check my Cloudflare interface (and their free plan doesn't allow to access historic data) so this time I'll only be able to share the chart from April 2 to May 2 – which is May 1 in practice I guess.

To sum up, there was a (usual) 10-13% increase in all the important indices (pageloads, sessions, unique visitors).

That means about 66,000 unique visitors last month.

Actually, there was a strange phenomenon too: Historically, and quite logically, Mondays are (were?) the days with the most visits since it's the day the newsletter is sent out and when I pollute all the keyboard communities with my posts.

Usually, it's a peak on Mondays on the chart and then on the following days this value goes back to normal.

However, since two weeks, pageloads have kept registering in these peak ranges for days, and the "normal" phase began on Thursday/Friday. In addition, the all-time visitor record is a Tuesday now.

I tried to find the cause of this but it seems to be generic: it isn't caused by a single post and the source of visits is quite diverse too.

KBD.NEWS Scholarship?!

So I got a limited number of discount codes from an undisclosed company.

Not the usual 5-10% discounts you see from most vendors but more generous ones.

Apparently, they want to break into the keyboard hobby/industry/community and promote their services so I thought I'd give these discounts to readers who, in return, could write a short post about their projects.

You could make your PCB project for free or for considerably cheaper, but have to write a short evaluation of the company's service which will be published here on kbd.news at the end of the usual post on your project.

I'm not sure about how intriguing and appealing this sounds. I'm not really familiar with the difference between the production quality and prices of various manufacturers either.

Anyway, let me know if you're interested.

To apply, you'll have at least a half-baked PCB, preferably an open-source one, because the discount codes will expire after some time.

I will disclose the company and the details next week. Just wanted to let you know this opportunity to start designing your PCBs. ;)

(I got five coupons as a test with the promise of more if this cooperation will turn out well.)

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That's all for today folks.

Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Mon 2nd May 2022. Featured in KBD #76.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial