Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the scenes #197

Under attack, KiiBOOM Phantom 81 review, Akko care package, keyboard projects, tips, keyboard art, Redragons in the mailbox, meetups, new vendors and discounts.

dovenyi
Published August 27, 2025

Hey, what's up everyone!

Welcome back for another recap and behind-the-scenes write-up – with some cool projects from the DIY keyboard scene, but also promising closed-source projects or even prototypes.

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.

PSA: These are the final hours to join the 3dkeycap MX tilting kit kickstarter. Check out my review here.

PSA2: If you wasn't able to reach kbd.news or got "Resource Limit Reached" error messages, that's because the site has been under constant attack by botnets, seriously impacting traffic starting around Aug 21-22.

The situation should be much better now, and the result will be a much more streamlined, faster and more optimized kbd.news – despite the continued attacks. More info at the very end of this post.

Some posts worth sharing

• I reviewed KiiBOOM's Phantom81 Lite, a cute wireless 75% keyboard with silly froggy keycap design – in a shiny molded ABS case.

• An open-source 50% keyboard with touchpad: Fifty by luteron6.

• A split by Dominic Holifield: the Split42 with a single controller and I/O expanders.

• Cata is a 34-key ortholinear keyboard with Gateron KS-33 switches – shared by skarmann.

• An open-source split with joysticks, shared by hex4: Glyph.

• FearlessSpiff shared the Ravensplit, the split version of his Raveniung.

• Glitch860 teased a rather uncommon layout with the angled monoblock Num64.

• A tiny wireless split by k3peta: Tiny18 – and yes, the name refers to the number of keys.

• Stephan Møller came up with a nice open-source split and a cool keyboard name: Mike Typeson.

Tip

• Keyreative unveils double-shot legends on the side. These can be separetely dye-subbed in a later step for more colors.

• Inpulib is a KiCad library for DIY mechanical keyboards, curated by miwayho. keyboard-kicad-lib is something similar by Eymeric65.

• Vial 0.7.5 released – supporting .vil save and load in Vial Web.

A notable development is that Vial Web now supports saving and loading .vil files, closing a major gap between the web and desktop Vial clients… – pgetreuer.

• Hedgehog v0.1.3 keycaps released by turtle_bazon. Different types for various spacings and stems.

• A cute game console: the Attiny Arduino Keychain Game Console by ArmourGrade – with two Kailh Choc V1 switches.

• Typing Tomes. Have I missed this one? I just can't find it anywere but the name rings a bell. Anyway, another typing practice app, this time using ePub books of your choice. With bigram and trigram stats, and also targeted drills.

• Predictive tap-hold QMK community module for intuitive home-row mods by jgandert.

• Retro-themed ZMK shield by Ziembski.

Closed-source, commercial, WIP, etc.

• Corne Min by mechboards.co.uk – with Kailh ULP switches.

• Prince42. A handwired wireless one by Weird_Spell.

• The handwired Iridiumhawksplit by boring-beaver – with VGA connectors.

• Ferris Sweep MX case by StormLuky.

• Sora by EndMePlssssss.

• Another handwired keyboard with some progress photos. By SfBattleBeagle.

• Delta Omega prototype by unspecworks. More photos.

• Wooden Corne – posted by Public_Bake1658.

• Substantial_Fan's Aurora Corne with a custom CNC aluminum case (files).

• Clavert V2.0 WIP by stvneads. A custom vertical split with keywell, and now nice!nanos.

• Moketa a WIP wireless unibody keyboard.
• Variable trackball angle. A short demo by BadDiscombobulated43.
• PNCATEHO by miwayho and turtle_bazon. A creditcard-sized chording keyboard with PG1316S switches.

History/Discovery

• A Soviet computer and keyboard from 1987.

• A nice Alcatel workstation with strange layout from JaschaE's teacher's private "museum". Probably from the late 80s, early 90s.

Keyboard art

• Stickerbombed Q65 by BradsCrazyTown.

• Tail Whip by Rain2.

• OK, the Cosmic Sans layout belongs to the art column. Posted by hauterloo92.

• Mask Off keyboard (IC) – posted by MrSosaaa.

• Wuque/GDK Lab DK1-60% with "marblano" – marble anodization.

• Typewriter style ceramic caps by GlazedCaps.

• Vaiiya keyboard. Posted by Patrick Pierre aka Patwwa.

• Just some printed paper combined with relegendable keycaps – turned into art. Shared by Ok_Party.

• Well, this is rather meme than art, and I probably shouldn't encourage this kind of layout. Anyway: 15U? spacebar by Bdeasyy.

In the mailbox

The real surprise was not a keyboard this time. Akko is turning 9, and I received a nice anniversary care package from them – out of the blue. What a nice gesture!

Akko cat pin badge, panda artwork, tea selection, branded fan and bottle. Akko EU offers a bunch of discounts at the moment to celebrate the event, so you can get the cat badge too:

• 15% OFF sitewide with code: AKKO9TH
• Special gift for orders over €99 (switch tester / 9th anniversary badge)
• Up to 50% at the German store.

And I received two boards from Redragon: the Eclipse K720 Pro and Behemoth K724 Pro. If you missed the news: the KBDNEWS coupon code is worth 10% discount now.

I'm still testing the Cornix and haven't got to the Evo75 yet, so these reviews will come a bit later. Actually, I'm really enjoying finetuning the Cornix, so here's a sneak peek before the upcoming review.

Donations

• No new donors in the past week, but as always, many thanks to my awesome regular supporters and everyone who helped this project thus far.

For all the donation options check out the donation page!

Meetup database

As always, this meetup database serves as 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.

Upcoming meetups

• ClackyFest 2025, August 30, Granada, Spain
• Alabama Mechanical Keyboard Meetup, August 30, Huntsville, AL, US
• MYMK Meetup 2025, August 30, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
• Madison Mech Mania Summer Meetup 2025, August 30, Madison, WI, US

Recently added

• NYC Mechanical Keyboard Meetup, September 20, Brooklyn, NY, US
• Tokyo Keyboard Expo, September 23, Tokyo, Japan
• Berlin MK Meetup, September 29, Berlin, Germany

Vendors & Discounts

Feel free to use the KBDNEWS discount code at 181 keyboard shops! And do not hesitate to report any issues! :)

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this past two weeks:

• CTRLshop is a new e-sport store in Czechia (shipping also to Poland and Slovakia), with lots of keyboards and switches. Andrea offered you a 3% discount (code: KBDNEWS).
• Metakeebs (CN) added.
• Awekeys added.
• Monokei reported and marked as sus.
• Arnav74's photos of the Swagkeys pop-up in Yongsan, Seoul. And some more with a blog post by JFK145.

Developments

Ugh. A lot of optimization, many small tweaks and new cached parts.

It took me some time to figure out what's going on after spotting the constant 100% CPU usage. Firstly, naively, I thought it's simply a visitor surge, so I hastily started to optimize scripts and queries, and added new cache functionality here and there, to smooth the resource usage graphs. :)

So the side-effect is a big boost to the speed of serving pages. :)

• Optimized indexing of data tables.
• Completely new rss handling. Properly cached, served as static file.
• Some slow services temporarily removed from some pages.
• Some really slow and rarely visited pages completely removed, temporarily.
• Plus other security measurements I'm not going to reveal.

All in all, I learned a lot about monitoring traffic, identifying bottlenecks, banning IP ranges the most effectively, reporting malicious behaviour, talking to cloud providers, optimizing code snippets for speed, memory usage and other resources.

It's been a very productive week! ;)

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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 Wed 27th Aug 2025. Featured in KBD #197.

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