Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the scenes #143
Giveaway and advent calendar update, quick news, in the mailbox, meetups, new vendor.
Published November 13, 2023
Hey y'all,
Some activities for you: The giveaway form in live, one week left to apply. You can fill out this mini poll too about your November switch purchases.
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Welcome back for another weekly recap and behind-the-scenes write-up.
If you are new to kbd.news, 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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Posts I thought were worth sharing:
- The DragonFruit is a VIK certified monoblock split by Protieusz.
- Ahmad Anshori shared Split Fire, a single-MCU handwired split keyboard with VGA connectors and joystick.
- Shay's HillSideView is a derivative of the original Hillside – with nice!view and more changes.
- A displaced ortho by James Gzowski: Proteus67 – with encoder.
- Victor published the CLP keycap profile, comprising a set of 19 nice sculpted keycap variants for MX switches.
- ZSA replaces its previous flashing utility (Wally) with Keymapp, soft-launched alongside the Voyager. It also provides per-layer heatmap and live view of your keymap, aiding the optimization and learning process.
- An old interview with Richard Nagy made me aware of Datamancer Keyboards and their steampunk, retro-Victorian and art deco keyboard designs from more than a decade ago. Sadly, Richard passed away in 2013, but the site is still online.
- The MK VendorTrust & Safety System aims to improve trust and transparency of vendors running group buys. PSA on r/MK.
- ZMK started a new series of "community spotlight" posts, highlighting interesting projects in the ZMK ecosystem. The first one by Nick Coutsos is about the Keymap Editor.
- N/A: pippikb by coleckion, a handwired Teensy 2.0 board by DanKrot, a Corne-ish handwired by DSLR_CNC, and the mapo46touch prototype by ma_po_daisuki.
- Brick and mortar: Qwertykey opened a third store in Romania (source).
- Musing: There are great keyboards in the $90-100 range (and below). There are even 60% CNC alu keyboards in the $90-100 range. And now there is a single-key macropad for the same price too.
Advent calendar update
The first drafts are already coming in – and they are awesome!
The line-up is close to final. I do have 24 contributors but there are still some pending authors, I'm waiting for confirmation or feedback. If there will be more than 24 articles then I'll simply keep posting after Christmas.
That said, it still isn't too late to contact me if you have a good idea and would like to participate.
Giveaway update
New offers keep coming in. You may check out the actual list of prizes.
Feel free to update your application or click here to enter the giveaway if you haven't done it yet.
Thanks to all the vendors who offered prizes for this event:
Bastard Keyboards, Capsule Deluxe, Chosfox, Custom Keyboard Co., Cyboard, Dangkeebs, FalbaTech, Goblintechkeys, Green Door Geeks, Heavymetalkeyboards, Keeb.supply, KEEBD, Keebmonkey, Kemove, Keyboard.io, Keycapsss, KEYGEM, KHOR, Kinetic Labs, Krome Keycaps, Little Keyboards, Mechanicalkeyboards.co.id, Mechboards, Mechbox, Mintlodica, Momokai, Turtlekeebs, Upgrade Keyboards, ZSA Technology Labs.
Donations
- New supporter: Mechboards.co.uk.
- And I missed some donations on Stripe last week. Sorry folks, I haven't received any notifications. So thanks Vitali for setting up a recurring donation earlier in October, and thank you Richard Dawe for you donation too.
- And as always, many thanks to everyone who helped this project thus far, especially to regular donors. Without you, this project wouldn't have survived for 3 years.
If you missed it last time, there are some new donation options. Some of you hate PayPal and think it's a big barrier. That's why I've added Stripe, PayPal, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon now. You find all the links on the donation page.
In the mailbox
I haven't bought anything these days. Cleaned the Videoton/Cherry, that's it.
Meetup database
The meetup season is slowly over, two of three new entries will be held next year:
- 8th Swiss MK Meetup, Dec 10, Zürich.
- Seoul Mechanical Keyboard Expo 2024, 2024 January 6, Seoul.
- KeyCon 2024, 2024 April 27, Salt Lake City.
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.
Vendor database
New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this week:
- ergoboards.xyz is a new shop based in New York.
Developments
- Advent calendar: I was told it would be more interesting to hide the contributors' name since that's how a classic advent calendar works. It would make sense, although having the authors displayed makes my work easier in the organizing phase: having a list/line-up to show potential authors when asking for their contribution is nice. Anyway, I made the hidden view too, so the calendar can be switch between the two modes now.
- The map tile service behind the maps on the vendor and meetup pages was closed a few days ago. I was sent a code snippet which in theory could help with migrating and solve the issue but unfortunately I had to upgrade to the latest OpenLayers version. I gave upgrading OL a chance, have wasted probably hours from my life for this piece of %&$_#! already and still couldn't display a freakin' marker. I gave up and removed most of the maps from the site. I don't know and don't care what Node is, don't want to use packet managers either when I just want a simple lightweight map engine I can simply copy to my server, possibly with working examples – like in the golden days. 😉 It seems I'm asking for too much. Anyway, maps were a nice touch to some pages of the blog but they are not essential. In addition, I run a free blog with some decent traffic but without selling anything, so a paid tile service? No thanks. (Sorry for the rant.)
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Still with me?
I only seem to get sick on weekdays. I must have a weekend immune system.
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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by. As always: Keep learning and building!
Until next time,
Tamás
Published on Mon 13th Nov 2023. Featured in KBD #143.
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