Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the scenes #149
Keyboard projects, quick news, in the mailbox, meetups, new vendors and discount codes!
Published January 5, 2024
Hey everyone, happy new year once again. Before we kick off 2024 with some cool DIY keyboard projects, you might check out my previous BTS/issue, the last one of 2023, and also my wrap-up of 2023. I had no time for newsletters so some of you may have missed these.
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.
Posts worth sharing this week
- The Planeta v1 is now fully open source (PCB). And the Velvet v2 and Planeta v2 are available at ergohaven.xyz.
- Tools & Tips: Adamwscki updated his kbplacer KiCad plugin with a bunch of new features. Alex shared a clean and simple KiCad starter tutorial. NumLockSmith published an online heatmap tool: maptikal.app (info).
- Shark's IBM keyboard database hits 3,000 keyboards recorded.
"I made a 3D typing test to make you motion sick" – GG00325.
- The humbly named Cool Typing Game by GG00325 drives me crazy but may work for you. Just slightly obtrusive.
- Handwiring: Sam Doddington shared the STLs of his Tana58! Ryan O'loughlan aka Tandoura made Move-Mech-Util, a handwired gamepad (case STLs and instructables). Andrea Varotto (itsvar8) made great progress with his monoblock with a numpad.
- WIP: BFB_Workshop is working on something interesting – Compaq'ed is an ortho PCB for the Cherry G80-11800.
- Switch: Gateron Melodic switch – a new click mechanism?
- Meme: I'm slightly late with this, but Jerre remixed Pavlo's sphere keyboard into a Christmas ornament.
- Weekly meh: Microsoft is adding a dedicated Copilot key to keyboards.
Keyboard art
There were multiple contenders for this week's keyboard art column of the newsletter.
I don't want to leave anyone out: Drift by timception, a custom Adam by Mattywoonyc, Dune-punk Unicorne by mkarikom, and Sonora Sunset-Sunrise artisans (name of a rock, tri-color jasper) by KeycapQuarry.
Donations
- We have some new donors: thanks Miranda F. and anonymous. Carl Westman (Brain) donated on BMC.
- And Gavin Folgert set up a recurring donation. Yay! Thanks everyone!
- As always, I'm grateful to all the kind dudes and dudettes who helped this project thus far, especially to regular supporters.
For all the donation options check out the donation page!
In the mailbox
The Zuiver.one parcel has arrived. (Sorry for the potato photos, these mats deserved better.) Really cool, high-quality deskmats, thanks a lot:
And some Coffeekeys stuff is here too. Thanks for the special discount Matteo. That said, I messed up the order and now I'm building the DR-70F without stabs to be able to take some photos… :D
Some more parcels on the way, e.g. I just paid VAT for the Ergohaven HPD.
Stats
Something happened on Dec 30, but I can't figure out what exactly. There was a huge peak in unique visitors (CF) but I can't see that big of a change in pageviews (GA). More visitors than pages checked? Anyway, the new visitor record is 121K unique users per 30 days now. Somebody grabbed the whole site but did it in a clever way? Or DoSed the same few pages for some reason? Idk.
Meetup database
New addition:
- Attraktor Meetup, Hamburg, 2024 Jan. 13., Germany
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.
Vendors & Discounts
New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this week:
- Markus/TweetyDaBird offered you a 5% discount (KBDNEWS) on base kits (Lotus/Chameleon/LBS), valid this month.
- NLandkeys added. Probably China, I'll update the entry if I get any response.
- ktechs.store added too.
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That's it for today, thanks for reading. Until next time,
Tamás
Published on Fri 5th Jan 2024. Featured in KBD #149.
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