Shenzhen was amazing. I need to spend more time there. But we need to get a little bit further with product design before I have a legitimate reason to go back.

We're planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign this fall. But we'd rather delay the campaign than launch something that we're not confident we can deliver and be proud of.

Initially, we intend to ship fully assembled & working keyboards. We believe pretty strongly that open hardware shouldn't require users to pick up a soldering iron. But we know that some folks _want_ a kit and we hope to get there eventually. If you're looking for something sort of like a Keyboardio keyboard in kit form, check out the ErgoDox on Massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/ergodox. (They require login before you can see things. It's unfortunate.)

There are definitely many awful MicroUSB ports out there, but there are also high-quality MicroUSB ports out there. The price difference between a cheap MicroUSB port and a high-end one is several orders of magnitude. As _specced_ they're supposed to be rated for more insertion cycles than MiniUSB.

We haven't made final component choices yet and this is something we're keenly aware of (and have debated internally). I'd be pissed if my keyboard's USB port failed. I'd be even more pissed if my customers' USB ports failed.

There are a few such sites, but http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/ is probably the most amazing of em.

That's correct. If you pop open a Maltron, there's a gorgeous web of fine copper wire. :)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/8413586842 is a photo my friend Mark took of my Maltron and Kinesis with the bottoms off.

The durability we're looking for is somewhere between aluminum and balsa.

For the contours we're going for, the mechanical engineers and product folks we've been working with have assured us that we couldn't get away with stamping. It's pretty much die casting or milling. The numbers we've been getting for die-cast tooling just don't work out for the scale of production run we're expecting. I'd love to be wrong about all this.

The interior "key plate" and the bottom plate of the enclosure will, of course, be stamped aluminum.

Black anodized isn't the look we're going for but yes, there are a number of things we could to to differentiate it while sticking with the aluminum.

I probably wouldn't call it 'silly', though I have no problem with you doing so. I agree 100% that this is a niche product. I made one because I wanted one. We wouldn't be having a go of making a full production run if people didn't keep trying to buy our personal test units.

If you catch me calling it revolutionary, please make fun of me.

When the production keyboards ship, they'll ship with a cord. (The same MicroUSB port charges the battery for the bluetooth controller, programs the keyboard and lets the keyboard be a regular USB keyboard)

They'll also ship with firmware source code and a screwdriver ;)

...as it happens, I got to play around with a current model Bloomberg keyboard the other day. It's a scissor-switch keyboard assembled in Mexico.

Yup. You'll also want to make sure to check the firmware for the bootloader on the microcontroller. But you'll be able to get to the ICSP header to do that.

I do a bit better when I've had a decent night's sleep and haven't spent the day on a trade-show floor. This was "Timothy finds Jesse standing around and asks him stuff" and not "interview with an agenda."

That being said, I totally need to learn a bit about concise speaking. Also, thanks :)

See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5449405&cid=47526135, but, uh. I never even vaguely meant to imply we'd be crazy enough to build keyswitches out of wood.

Hi, jesse of keyboardio here.

As of this week, the editors actually have it more correct than our website. We'd been prototyping in wood. In between when the video was shot last month and when this got posted, we finally got our first "finalish" aluminum prototype made. The aluminum prototype was what we talked about publicly on Highway1 (highway1.io) demo day and what we hoped to launch publicly. Once we had it in hand, we discovered a bunch of reasons we're not going to go with aluminum for production. (Mostly, cost, Weight, looking too much like an Apple product, weight, and weight.) We went back to the drawing board and believe we've got techniques, technologies and costs for commercial manufacture of a milled wood enclosure. We've been at OSCON this week, but should get the website updated soonish.

God no. Someone actually offered to sell us some endangered hardwood for the keyboards the other day. The plan is for something reasonably, pretty, reasonably hard, reasonably sustainable and reasonably inexpensive. N