Pilot run success and what’s next

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

TL;DR: The first 50 UHKs and palm rests of the pilot run were delivered, and according to the feedback we received it was a huge success! The recipients of the pilot run gave us a ton of feedback, so we’ll go over the issues they encountered, and tell you how we’ll fix them in upcoming batches. We’re raising the price of the palm rest to $55, and we’ll raise the rest of the items by 10% soon. We plan to deliver the remaining 1,950 UHKs of the first batch from February to April. We’re putting an increasingly heavy emphasis on finalizing and manufacturing the modules.

The Pilot Run Was a Huge Success

It’s one thing to design a product, and another to ship it to all over the world. András and I poured our hearts and souls into this project, we obsessed about the smallest of details, and even though we were definitely hoping for the best, we couldn’t know for sure how much you’d like the end product, so it’s safe to say that we were excited.

I’m happy to say that the feedback we received from the recipients of the pilot run was absolutely fantastic! You praised the overall build quality, the nice packaging, the onboarding experience, and the ease of use of Agent among other things.

Let me feature a couple of your tweets:

Thanks so much for the posts, everyone! Your enthusiasm and support have been overwhelming!

Pilot Run Issues

Despite its success, the pilot run wasn’t without issues. In the spirit of transparency, we’ll go through all of the issues you encountered.

Smashed Boxes

There are two small boxes within the main UHK box which got smashed on four occasions out of the fifty pilot run units. We believe that some of these occurrences went unreported, and there may be more. This is what a smashed box looks like:

We spent a ton of time and a fortune on packaging, so this is a big deal. Even worse, on one occasion, even the case of a keyboard snapped apart. Luckily, the owner managed to snap it back with a bit of pressure, but this doesn’t make the issue any more acceptable.

According to the reports we received, only USPS-shipped UHKs were affected. We’re not sure whether it was due to the holiday madness, or if it’s a general issue, but we reinforced the boxes, which will hopefully resolve this issue in the long run.

Sharp USB Cable Recess

There are two recesses in the case which hold the USB cable and they’re way too sharp and chew up the USB cable quickly.

The mold has already been modified, so the edges should be smooth going forward. A backer reported that he easily managed to sand down the sharp edge, resolving the issue in no time. If you’re affected, you might want to do the same, but if you want a replacement case, please just let us know.

Loosely Connected LED Display

Some of you reported strange artifacts appearing on your LED display, which is a sure sign of a loose FFC cable.

The FFC cable connects the display with the left main board. Apparently, we could have done a better job connecting them during the assembly process. As a result, the cables of two UHKs got loose during shipping. We’ll try our best to more thoroughly assemble future batches.

This issue called for our first ever repair guide. We have already emphasized the importance of repair before, and this was the golden opportunity to follow our words up with action. Both affected backers were able to fix the issue using the guide and they even contributed to it. Thanks so much!

Just to get things straight, we don’t expect anybody to repair his/her UHK, but the opportunity is there, and we encourage repair in general. It’s certainly much faster than sending it back and forth to the other side of the world, and especially useful after the warranty period is over.

Feet Molding Issues

On two occasions, visible artifacts were noticeable on some feet.

This is clearly an injection molding issue. We’ll do heavier QA in this respect.

Software and Firmware Issues

A number of issues have been reported recently in the firmware and agent repos. The vast majority of these issues are not critical, but they affect usability in one way or another.

Understandably, we’ve been mostly busy with the critical issues. The most critical was a firmware issue that made the UHK freeze after a while. This was really annoying because it was super hard to find the root cause of it. Luckily, it looks like we’ve been able to resolve this, and it shouldn’t affect more people.

There was another critical issue in which the left keyboard half got bricked during the firmware update process. I’ve made the update process more robust, and improved the update script, which unbricked the unit. This script feature will be integrated into Agent soon. The UHK should very rarely get bricked, and when it happens it should always be unbrickable.

Going forward, we’ll be addressing all of the issues of the agent and firmware repos, but there’s a lot on our plate nowadays, so some may take a while. We’re doing our best.

All Hail Our Contributors

Mikko Lakomaa, an early contributor of ours, switched into high gear after receiving his UHK, and implemented two much-welcomed issues. Thanks to the fruits of his labor, now we can adjust mouse speed and LED brightness via Agent.

Thanks so much for your contributions, Mikko! It’s nice to see Agent improving so rapidly.

Price Increases

Effective immediately, we’re raising the price of the palm rest to $55, and we’ll raise the rest of the items by 10% soon. Let me explain why.

When we originally envisioned the UHK palm rest, its design wasn’t finalized, and we weren’t sure about the materials and technologies we’d ultimately use to craft it. We were also unfamiliar with the costs involved. As the design progressed, we were consistently moving toward an increasingly high-end, premium product which inevitably added to its cost, so much so that up until this point we haven’t had any profit on the palm rests when selling them for $30.

For what the palm rest is worth, $55 is still a bargain considering the market prices. If you search for “wooden wrist rest”, $40 is a usual price tag, but those palm rests are made of one wood piece, not two pieces, don’t feature powder coated black plates, and their geometry is less ergonomical (simpler, thus cheaper to machine) than the UHK palm rest.

Eventually, we’ll further raise the price of the current wooden UHK palm rest to about $80 which is a reasonable market price, but before doing so, we plan to offer a less premium, and more affordable palm rest in addition to the current wooden palm rest.

We’ll also soon raise the price of the other items by about 10%, including the UHK, extra keycap sets, extra cases, and the modules. This is justified by the heavy weakening of the US dollar during 2017. We pay our suppliers primarily in Hungarian forint, so this very much affects us. 10% is actually less than the weakening of the dollar which is about 15%, so we’re trying to not raise prices too heavily.

Nobody likes price increases, but we’d much rather take this route than sacrificing quality, or allocating less funding for R&D. We hope you understand and resonate with our mindset.

Expected Delivery and What’s Next

Going forward, our most immediate goal is to deliver the remaining 1,950 UHKs and accessories (everything but the modules) of the first batch. We expect to deliver these items from February to April, and then the second batch will closely follow.

Our assembly operation is admittedly micro-scale compared to the assembly lines of China. As we previously stated, instead of hiring a Chinese OEM for assembly, we opted to set up our own assembly line in Hungary and operate it in the long term. This has numerous benefits, like rigorous QA and direct control, but the downside is that the throughput of this line is rather low.

It wouldn’t make sense to massively scale up production because the accumulated preorders translate to a huge peak regarding assembly. It’ll considerably settle down after delivering the pre-orders, so hiring a bunch of people only to fire them soon afterwards doesn’t seem like a good idea.

We plan to keep assembly going continuously, and ship so-called mini batches on a weekly basis. We’ll remind you in a future update to change your shipping address before orders start going out, but please do check/change your current address by going to your Crowd Supply account.

As for the modules, fear not, we didn’t forget about them. We’ll be allocating more and more resources to finalize and manufacture them. András has been working on them recently, and this is the latest, and probably final design of the trackball module.

I think András did a great job designing this module. I cannot wait to see it work and give it a whirl (pun clearly intended).

Thank you for reading this update! We hope you enjoyed it, and we’re excited to talk to you on 2018-02-15.

The comments are closed, but our forum is available for public discussion.

23 Comments

  1. Adam 2018-01-19 at 03:17

    That trackball module looks SO good. I'm very happy with the slim / low profile mouse keys, as I have found using full-travel mechanical switches as mouse keys causes severe RSI in my wrists. I also love that the trackball's color is black instead of red, so that it matches well with any custom keyset I want. So glad to be a part of this project.

    • László Monda 2018-01-19 at 03:58

      Sorry to hear that mouse keys caused you RSI. You might have a different experience with a UHK. Wondering about your mouse key configuration and switch choice. I use the UHK mouse keys very often and no RSI yet. I think tenting helps and optimal mouse key placement, speed and acceleration settings are very important.

      Regarding the color of the trackball, we don't really have a lot of artistic freedom. As it turns out, black is the only color with which the optical sensor plays nicely.

      • Adam 2018-01-19 at 05:47

        The issue is with my TEX Yoda, with a trackpoint in between the G/H/B keys.I get RSI because of the full 4mm travel to register a press, probably combined with the location of the trackpoint relative to the buttons. Even with a palm rest I experience problems. I use ThinkPad laptops exclusively, and I've never had a problem using the trackpoint full time. Part of it is the built-in palm rest and shorter mouse key travel, the other part is the proximity of the trackpoint to the mouse buttons. With everything closer it is much more natural to use.

        I'm hoping the UHK will be the full built-in mouse + mechanical keyboard solution I've been looking for.

        • László Monda 2018-01-19 at 13:27

          Thanks for explaining! Large key travel distance may contribute to your RSI, although MX switches activate halfway. In any case, an MX board is definitely a different experience than Thinkpad keyboards. Our hopes are high that the UHK will feel comfortable for you in the long run.

  2. Fiss 2018-01-19 at 03:38

    Will the increased prices be for existing backer-orders (First Batch) or for ongoing batches? I assume this is for future orders, but I want to ask to make sure a now-non-active credit card isn't going to try to get charged for an order through Crowd Supply and then delay my order when it can't find the money. If you do have to increase the cost of the wrist-rest to $80, are you planning on any other woods, stains, materials? Not saying the first isn't nice...it's awesome at $40 but I'm not sure I'd pay $80 for a second one.

    Anyway, above all, you're being honest and open and I really do appreciate that. If I send you some Jolt Cola, would you get mine out to me next? :D

    • László Monda 2018-01-19 at 04:06

      The increased prices only pertain to future orders. It'd be very unethical (and probably illegal) for us to charge extra for past orders.

      Eventually, we might extend the options of the palm rest, but certainly not nowadays. We still have to deliver a ton of units, and also design the modules, so we're pretty flooded.

      Let me think about the Jolt Cola. Hard to resist :)

      • Fiss 2018-01-19 at 08:11

        Excellent, thanks for confirming. And yes...Jolt Cola is hard to resist. What better beverage to try out my UHK when it arrives? HACK THE PLANET! :)

  3. Joel 2018-01-19 at 05:19

    At first when my wife saw the new keyboard, she was less than thrilled, but when I told her the story behind the keyboard and how it came to market, she completely changed her tune. I'm loving the layout, customization, and build quality. I can't wait for the modules!

  4. AJ 2018-01-19 at 08:03

    Great work so far on this guys. It looks like all of the UHKs in the pilot run were black. Will everyone in the first batch who selected a color still receive a colored UHK?

    • László Monda 2018-01-19 at 13:30

      Yes, every pilot run UHKs were black. We explicitly told pilot run recipients that this is a limitation if they want to participate. The colored cases will be manufactured very soon.

  5. Alex 2018-01-19 at 17:19

    Congratulations on the successful pilot run. You said you will send out the first batch in weekly mini-batches. Will there be a longer evaluation period between the first and the second batch or is the second batch supposed to be shipped out immediately after all units from the first batch are sent?

    • László Monda 2018-01-19 at 17:35

      Hi there! There won't be an evaluation period between batch 1 and batch 2. By the time we'll manufacture batch 2, the units will be more than well tested.

  6. Austin 2018-01-22 at 18:15

    I'm extremely impressed with the whole UHK project. As an embedded engineer, I know how difficult it can be to bring a product from design all the way through delivery.

    Furthermore, the degree of transparency you're maintaining is excellent. I want to stress that in my experience the issues you're encountering is not unusual at this stage in a project -- but you're level of openness is. Keep it up!

  7. Josh 2018-01-26 at 11:28

    Curious about the shipping timing. Right now Crowd supply is saying my estimated ship date is late February. Is this accurate with regards to where I fall in line for the mini-batches you discussed? Or is that just a generic date for everyone? It'd be great to see an approximate ship date within the February - April time frame based on the date of our orders.

    • László Monda 2018-01-27 at 02:36

      It's a generic date. We have a multi-step manufacturing process in place, and it's rather hard to estimate accurately. DHL will send you a shipping notification emal. Thanks for your understanding!

  8. EdbO 2018-01-26 at 12:07

    I'm using my UHK everyday from the early start at work till the evening I'm going to bed. I realy like UHK and get more and more used to it. I can't wait to click the trackball onto the UHK and start using it :-) . Colleagues see the (splitted) keyboard, and start asking "What have you done?" ............

    But get the keyboards out first so everyone can experience the UHK.

  9. Kim 2018-02-06 at 17:21

    I can not wait to get my hands on this keyboard!

    Is there a place, where it is possible to see one’s place in the queue?
    That would be awesome ;)

    • László Monda 2018-02-06 at 19:38

      We wish we could make a UI to show one's place in the queue real-time but it'd be rather time consuming to implement it. We'd much rather focus on manufacturing and delivery. We'll do our best to keep you up-to-date in our upcoming updates, though. Thanks so much for the your understanding and support!

  10. IzK 2018-02-08 at 03:19

    I have made two buys with two different accounts by mistake (but easy to find out): one with the keyboard and another with a key cluster and the palm rests.
    The keyboard is going to be sent on 23 february (I know it's not an exact date), but what about the palm rests? Are they coming with the keyboard or with the module?

    And another question is about the color of the palm rest. You said last month: "We made one or two palm rest prototypes with graphite color, and weren't satisfied with the results. Maybe we'll give it a try later, but not anytime soon, because it'll take quite some time to get it right, and we're very busy with other things nowadays."
    Would those experiments be done before or after the modules are finished? As in that case maybe I can wait a bit longer. ;-)

    By the way, the professional photos are awesome!

    • László Monda 2018-02-08 at 15:52

      Hi there! Am I right that you used two different Crowd Supply accounts and ordered with both? We aggregate the goods on a per account basis to ship them once, so this will lead to some of yours orders arriving later than if you ordered with one account. It'd be the best if you cancelled the orders of one of your account (and possibly terminate that account to avoid further issues), then repurchase the cancelled goods with your other account. Ideally, you should keep the account with the earliest UHK order to receive the goods as soon as possible.

      The keyboard will come with the palm rest given that they're ordered with one account. The modules will come later separately.

      As for the palm rest, we will hardly have to experiment with it before shipping the modules. Sorry, but we're very busy with manufacturing.

      Glad you like the photos! :)

      • IzK 2018-04-25 at 17:05

        László, I think my order ID 22795 (only keyboard) will be minibatch number 3, but I purchased the modules + the palm rest with the other account (order ID 25030).

        Can you ship the keyboard and the palm rest together leaving the modules for later? If not, don't worry. I understand that it can be messy.

        • László Monda 2018-04-25 at 18:25

          Hey there! Oh boy, this is really not ideal. Why did you make two accounts? :) This way, we can't merge your orders and ship them at once which we normally do by default. I'm afraid we can't arrange this situation, and your orders will be shipped on a per-account basis separately. Sorry about it!

          • IzK 2018-05-04 at 12:17

            A few hours ago I have received amazing news:
            On monday 7th, I'll receive my UHK!

            Thank you!!!!!!

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