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I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

electronicmaterialsoffice.com

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Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#621

Post by TylerE »

agentwiggles wrote: post #580
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually pulled that example from watching my sibling learn the piano in the 90's using that exact method. The teacher used stickers on the keys to speed up the initial muscle memory building (it also kept younger kids from getting discouraged so easily due to difficulty). After a few simple tunes and when they knew where "G" was without the stickers and without counting from middle "C", the stickers came off and t…

One funny thing about being a largely self-taught guitarist is that I spent years with the instrument not knowing the names of the notes I was playing. Especially since guitarists tend to play a lot of tablature, you can get surprisingly adept without knowing the notes. This works out ok for a while, but eventually becomes limiting as you try to expand your fretboard and music theory knowledge.

Guitar is much easier since it's just notes... whereas on piano a given interval can need a different stretch depending on the notes.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#622

Post by smoldesu »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #603
cantSpellSober wrote: post #570

Cool, congrats and thanks for sharing, we need more competition here 1. raised/indented keys will get dirty really fast, an option without would sell me 2. 2-device pairing is great, your competitors have 3 though 3. hot-swap keycaps would be a huge sell 4. nice typography, why isn't the logo in it? take off the logo 5. replace the empty area with home => end 6. 3 modifiers on the left, 3 right please! (not 4-left/2-…

> 14. add clit mouse I've tried a lot of really nice mech keyboards but this is the one thing that makes me go back to my 'ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II'. It's super nice to never have to leave home row and I definitely feel the relief in terms of RSI.

The Tex Shinobi is an excellent upgrade if you've got the cash. I've been using one for a few months now and absolutely adore the typing/tracking experience.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#623

Post by swamp40 »

dang wrote: post #521

This is a cool project but there needs to be more than a signup page for it to qualify as a Show HN - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html . We've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.

I'm wondering if you shouldn't have different rules for hardware than for software? For instance, what if somebody told him Apple had patented indented buttons and he couldn't use them? I see lots of good improvement ideas here in the comments.

Actually tooling up all these parts will cost him $100,000 before a single person can "try" one - so obviously he needs all the suggestions he can get before that stage.

Or, maybe "Show HN" is just better suited for software?

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#624

Post by Zancarius »

tartoran wrote: post #369
glxxyz wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a dual boiler espresso machine (La Spaziale S1) for 10 years that's a typography horror show. There are less than 10 words on the device and they managed to use 4 completely different fonts: their logo font (which I actually like), a squat serif thing for 'S1', an ugly script font, and worst of all for the 'BOILER' and 'ON/OFF' buttons: Comic Sans. It occasionally bothers me but most of the time I'm able to…

Sometimes things have their own personalities and I came to love that and stop obsessing over how I wish they were designed. At the end of the day we’re free to design and build things ourselves. What’s more irking to me is bad functional design that makes awkward to use things.

I agree. The fonts don't bother me so much as the ISO layout does, and even that's kind of a "meh" and something I likely wouldn't care about so much as the otherwise clean styling and the fact it's projected to have some features I like (Bluetooth, low profile, mechanical switches, etc).

Truthfully, from a quick search it appears that the Kailh low profile switches are reasonably easy to find key caps for. I like blank keyboards (uh, don't ask), so I'd probably just buy some blank caps and replace the ones that it comes with. I had to do that with some of the keys on my Das anyway because the stems broke after To each his own! I'd probably buy this, if I were honest.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#625

Post by ebastler »

cantSpellSober wrote: post #570

Cool, congrats and thanks for sharing, we need more competition here 1. raised/indented keys will get dirty really fast, an option without would sell me 2. 2-device pairing is great, your competitors have 3 though 3. hot-swap keycaps would be a huge sell 4. nice typography, why isn't the logo in it? take off the logo 5. replace the empty area with home => end 6. 3 modifiers on the left, 3 right please! (not 4-left/2-…

2. This one is basically limited by what a 3 position slider (usb/bt1/bt2) can do, the firmware could do up to 5. We could offer an alternative firmware where the slider can do bt1/bt2/bt3, and USB or Bluetooth is automatically determined by whether it's plugged in or not if that helps.

5. That space is needed for the battery, since the board is too slim to place it elsewhere.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#626

Post by confounded »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #603
cantSpellSober wrote: post #570

Cool, congrats and thanks for sharing, we need more competition here 1. raised/indented keys will get dirty really fast, an option without would sell me 2. 2-device pairing is great, your competitors have 3 though 3. hot-swap keycaps would be a huge sell 4. nice typography, why isn't the logo in it? take off the logo 5. replace the empty area with home => end 6. 3 modifiers on the left, 3 right please! (not 4-left/2-…

> 14. add clit mouse I've tried a lot of really nice mech keyboards but this is the one thing that makes me go back to my 'ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II'. It's super nice to never have to leave home row and I definitely feel the relief in terms of RSI.

After spending more time and money than on fancy keyboards than I'd like to admit, two of these side by side (an informal 'split' keyboard) is by far the easiest on my wrists and shoulder blades.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#627

Post by ebastler »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #480
interleave wrote: post #423

This looks fantastic! A thought-experiment that may interest you coming from someone (me) who already has happily spent several hundreds of dollars on mechanical keyboards and uses them every single day: Let's imagine the keyboard could be bought today as-is with a simple "Buy Now" button and price was no concern. The two main reasons I would _still_ hesitate to hit that button are: 1. I absolutely and undoubtedly ne…

Down in tech specs it says the switches are Kailh Chocolate Low Profile Reds, which are a reasonably common linear switch. Also, OP, you've got a typo in those same specs: OS support is listed as "Apple MacOS 12 (Monteray) and up". That should be Monterey with an E. I'm a bit curious why the keyboard requires MacOS 12 or Windows 10, and doesn't list Linux support...it's an HID device. Just about anything will work, r…

I think that's mostly a "I tested it with these OS so I can guarantee it works" thing - ZMK should work with pretty much anything out there as long as it can do HID over Bluetooth.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#629

Post by pvg »

swamp40 wrote: post #623
dang wrote: post #521

This is a cool project but there needs to be more than a signup page for it to qualify as a Show HN - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html . We've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.

I'm wondering if you shouldn't have different rules for hardware than for software? For instance, what if somebody told him Apple had patented indented buttons and he couldn't use them? I see lots of good improvement ideas here in the comments. Actually tooling up all these parts will cost him $100,000 before a single person can "try" one - so obviously he needs all the suggestions he can get before that stage. Or, m…

The rules are slightly different for hardware in that readers aren't going to to be able to immediately try it like software, some essentially unique builds that nobody (statistically) is going to try come by sometimes, etc. A thing that doesn't yet exist can't be showhn, though.

There's nothing stopping anyone from posting about unfinished things, they just can't be 'Show HN'.

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