Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the scenes #199
Behind the scenes with the Evoworks Evo75 review, open-source projects, tips, keyboard art, meetups, new vendors, discounts, etc.
Published September 29, 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: I had a minor surgery, and I'm still recovering from it. I haven't got back to some of you, sorry. Trying to work through my backlog.
Some posts worth sharing
- Review: The Evoworks Evo75 is an elegant 75% tri-mode wireless keyboard with ball-catch and leaf-spring structure, coming in a multitude of beautiful variants. Meticulously designed and tuned for an exceptional out-of-the-box typing experience.
- Dane Lipscombe shared his Tengoku, a split keyboard with keywell and trackpads.
- ChnMasterOG released the TrackPoint78, a three-mode wireless keyboard with built-in trackpoint.
- An open-source wireless ergo keyboard with trackpad and encoder: Daedalus by Perseus-Lynx.
- The Clacky Chan by Stephan Møller is an ergo split with custom tenting and firmware.
- A major update to axseem's open-source wireless split: Anywhy Flake v2.
- The Sputnik by Vostoklabs is a cheap handwired Corne-derivative, designed with focus on sound.
- Jakmazdev's simple, parametric tenting solution via Magsafe for any split keyboard setup.
Closed-source, commercial, WIP, etc.
- I wasn't aware of the foldable 60% F68 keyboard by Royal Kludge.
- Coming soon: A rarely seen weirdness – the 100% ND104 at Chilkey. With excellent modular options.
- The Keychron Q16 HE is a fully ceramic keyboard by Keychron. Yep. Full ceramic build with ceramic case.
- Nama. Wuque Studio cooking up something mysterious.
- The Wanderer by kaumovich – Reviung layout with Kailh PG1316 switches.
- Wireless Bridges/Crosses prototypes by timbetimbe.
- An early In10did prototype with the WW2 fighter cockpit vibe.
- Khm. The Puff40 is a keyboard mockup sold as a switch tester, available in various cool colors on Aliexpress. C0qu1 decided to handwire one to turn it into a usable periphery: the puff40hw.
- Hotswap trackball prototype by BadDiscombobulated43.
- Phalanx 36 by mkovaxx. A WIP wireless split, fully eliminating lateral finger travel by sticking to four columns – one column per finger.
- Open_Purple1955 made a one-handed device for his fractured wrist.
Typing, Keymap, Tips
- Keyboard Layout Editor NG by adamws. A reimplementation of the popular Keyboard Layout Editor designed to provide a better user experience while maintaining compatibility with existing layouts.
- WIP RAW HID project by mctechnology17: temperature and Spotify on a display.
- Adam Savage shot a video with Ryan Norbauer about the Norbauer Seneca, "the world's most overengineered keyboard". Not even mentioning the price tag.
- Talpkeyboard's Yousuke, running a keyboard shop since 2017, wrote an article about recent keyboard history.
- Rasmus K. Rendsvig (aka humanplayer2) shared an MX converter for ThinkPad keycaps.
- Typecome update. An optionally competitive typing practice app.
History/Discovery
- I love the Telcon Zorba, just like any other luggage computer of the time. ;) Restored by Markerbin.
- An orbiTouch spotted at this year's CES?!
Keyboard art
- Wow. Muji's MIYO is a functioning analog watch keycap.
- Ouch. While others are working on marble keyboards, Osidian came out with a labradorite board group buy.
- Vintage 75 CU, a build by Soyabeansesame. "Can only afford the least amount of copper (about 0.4micron thick)".
- A Mechboards Hyper7 R4 on the runway for New York Fashion Week.
- Knob/valve posted by Perfect-Apartment530.
- Classy opening of the Matrix NOOS. Photo by Kuzenzz.
- A floppy disk inspired 40% board by sohke3.
- ChadNebri_ was going for an Alien theme. Custom caps from Yuzu Keycaps.
- Oh.type's GMK Abstract shot by Sterlingandcophoto.
In the mailbox
- I received a purple Era75 Cyberpunk from Womier, along with some switch samples.
(Stock photo because I left it in my office before undergoing a surgery, and I'm still recovering at home.)
Donations
- Sungo and Chase M. have set up recurring donations. Yay!
- Other new donors: Gautier M. and Rebecca L. Thanks everyone!
- And 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
- Berlin MK Meetup, September 29, Berlin, Germany
- QWERTYFEST 2025, October 3, Milwaukee, WI, US
Recently added
- YugoMK Meetup 2025, October 25, Belgrade, Serbia
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- Photo gallery and aftermovie added to the Bologna meetup page.
- Added Daihuku's videos to the Tokyo Keyboard Expo entry. E.g. this shorter one:
Tokyo Keyboard Expo happened in Akihabara on Sept 22. About 600–800 people attended, making it larger than KeyCon this year. Over 50 brands were present, including overseas ones – Artistic_Sprinkles95.
Vendors & Discounts
Feel free to use the KBDNEWS discount code at 185 keyboard shops worldwide! And do not hesitate to report any issues! :)
New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this past two weeks:
- Royal Kludge now offers you a 5% discount (code: KBDNEWS). E.g. check out the foldable 60% F68 keyboard.
- HNK Hide Nothing Keyboard added. Wooden keyboards from Canada.
- ErgoKeeb (Hong Kong) added.
Developments
Continued attacks, continued optimization, plus many other tweaks.
- Freshly cached: switch pages, currency exchange rates for switch price calculations, hall of fame with my supporters, etc.
- Optimizing RSS feeds.
- In addition, all missing "quick news" links have been added to their respective historical issue pages. I had to write a dedicated script for this, procrastinating for about a year.
Kbd.news RSS feed musings
So I don't use RSS, but there are two feeds for you to follow all the blog posts or just the weekly/fortnightly new issues.
After these feeds being in place for about 5 years, I've tried out how they look in a dedicated reader for the real user, and realized that there's plenty of room for improvement. ;)
In addition, quite a lot of people (and crawlers) are hitting these xmls, so after rewriting the logic to serve static files instead of phps, I've also unified the many url variants into a single new path served directly: rss.xml and rss_weekly.xml. I've set up redirects of old files and old redirects (yeah..), they will stay for a while, but these are the new places to look for the feeds.
In hindsight, it was the best decision to fully revamp the RSS feeds. About 10-25% of all the traffic is made up by these two files, which is insane. Because most of these hits are completely unnecessary, coming from various feed readers continuously. If you experience errors, one reason for that may be that I've banned some notorious feed reader bots because of their borderline malicious frequency of revisits.
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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by. All in all, it's been another productive week! As always: Keep learning and building!
Until next time,
Tamás
Published on Mon 29th Sep 2025. Featured in KBD #199.
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