iFixit gets behind our repair-friendly design

László Monda
2015-06-17

We at Ultimate Gadget Laboratories are unusually repair-conscious, especially compared to our throw-away culture. Most consumers are used to throw away gadgets when they break without second thinking. It's not only the fault of people because they're conditioned this way. Such an event of product failure is seen by the vast majority of corporations as the golden opportunity to extract even more money out of us, not only at expense of our pockets but the expense of our environment. But it doesn't stop here. Nowadays, companies are proactively trying to disable customers in every way possible repair-wise to increase their profits.

iFixit is at the forefront of progressing the state of repair. They provide a platform to publish tear-down guides so that one can repair any device based on these guides. Their manifesto speaks their values cleaner than I ever could and they also recently founded the Digital Right to Repair Coalition to fight for our right to repair.

Recently, I put together a document to let them know about our ways to make the UHK as repairable as possible. Apparently, they liked our concepts so much that they ended up making a post about us in their blog.

Displaying disassembly instructions on the PCB is one of our many ways to make repair easier.

Thank you very much for the opportunity and especially for improving the state of repair, iFixit. We salute you!

Validating the 5th generation prototype

László Monda
2015-06-09

Over the last weekend András and I were having a meeting to test whether our latest and greatest 5th generation prototype really fits together as expected. We've made a couple of improvements to this version, the most significant being the stainless steel inserts. Even though this might not seem like such a big deal to the outsider, in reality András had to make a huge number of changes to the CAD model to make this happen.

As always, a picture says more than a thousand words so let us show you the real deal.

The inside of the semi-assembled right keyboard half

The back of the right keyboard half

The stainless steel inserts

The case in pieces

Parts laying all around

Everything fit together very nicely apart from the 1.5mm thick stainless steel plates which were really 1.3mm thick due to the fault of the company that we entrusted. We're gonna have the steel plates of the correct thickness eventually and we'll assemble some prototypes using those.

UHK + People = Fun times

László Monda
2015-06-02

It's always fun for me to see people experience our beloved keyboard and realize how it is familiar and yet different in a cool way. Lately, I've been to a Toptal meeting, followed by JSConf 2015 Budapest. In my true style, a prototype was in my backpack waiting to be seen by people. Naturally, some pictures were shot.

Even more recently, András and I were attending to a meetup at Ustream Hungary and the organizers have asked me to give a talk about the UHK in quite an unexpected fashion. I used our website as a presentation medium and got 5 minutes but the attendees asked so many questions that it ended up being about 20 minutes and people still couldn't get enough after the talk! It was a great experience for everyone involved.

Some of the things I learned along the way:

Wherever you present always make sure people take some pictures. A lot more pictures could have been shot than the above.
Demoing the UHK on mobile is a novel experience for most, but a programmer's editor is very much needed. Just purchased DroidEdit Pro.
I've really gotta get some name cards made.
After conference parties are fun but be sure not to stay there too late or else the next day you'll look like crap due to the lack of sleep.
I've gotta get some tan because I look hopelessly pale next to Pablo. I don't wanna look white and nerdy.

3D printing the LED display

László Monda
2015-05-21

Yesterday András and I were attending to the opening of the 3D printing showroom of Varinex Zrt. who is the largest 3D printing company of Hungary. We were pleasantly surprised to see that one of the printers, namely a venerable Objet Connex 500 was printing 3 LED displays of our prototypes. Watching these printers in action is always very interesting so here's a short video for your viewing pleasure.

The 5th generation PCB has arrived!

László Monda
2015-05-11

We're glad to announce that we've just received our 5th generation PCB! Compared to the previous version it's compatible with the ISO layout. Its contour is also a lot more complex to make place for the stainless steel inserts of the back side. Last but not least, the silkscreen became a lot more helpful, clearly showing the values of the various components, making assembly a lot easier.

The PCB is out of the box, neatly shrinkwrapped by Eurocircuits

Front side

Back side

Near the MCU

Redesigning the PCB always involves a ton of work and at this point it's more than mature so we don't plan to reiterate any more before the campaign.

Wanna see a bunch of high resolution pictures of the PCB? Head over the Google Plus album!

Make Your Choice!

László Monda
2015-05-05

From time to time we get emails from you asking about the various options that you will able to choose from. In order to answer your questions properly we've added a new section to our site titled Make Your Choice. You're welcome to check it out to see the details for yourself.

Recording the audio samples for the 5 switch types was an especially time-consuming part of creating this section. As usual, we were serious about the details and quality so much so that I've asked my buddy Dömötör Gyimesi, founder and leader of Dreamgrave to help record these samples in their rehearsal room.

Recording the sweet sound of mechanical switches

To make matters even more complex the continuous typing recording was created by me typing "ultimatehackingkeyboard" using every one of the 5 switch types. In practice, this was done by swapping the relevant 17 switches 4 times and rerecording the samples every time. Unlike all the other switches of this prototype these were not soldered in in order for them to be easily swappable. Still, the metal plate is quite tight and a signficiant amount of force had to be exerted in order to pop out the switches. Dömi was patient enough to wait for us so mad props to him!

Trying to pop out that damn switch

As for the gory technical details, an AT4040 cardioid condenser microphone was used for the recording with a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 USB sound card along with the Cubase 7. Dömi hand-picked the best parts of the samples. No normalization was done on the samples to preserve their qualities as much as possible.

Let me take the opportunity to thank Dreamgrave for their help! Without them the recordings couldn't have been nearly as professional as they are. Be sure to check out Dreamgrave on Bandcamp, and listen to their sweet tunes!

Introducing the first mountable keyboard

László Monda
2015-04-20

We're in the process of finalizing our 5th generation prototype and thrilled about a new feature: threaded inserts! According to our knowledge this makes the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard the first keyboard ever that is mountable to external objects. "What external objects?" - you may ask. Think about things like a tilt stand, a kiosk or the arms of a chair. As usual, we have some pictures to show you the gory details.

It's easy to spot the 4 threaded inserts per keyboard half:

Same deal with the bottom part of the keyboard halves removed:

This makes the shape of the PCBs crazier than ever before:

We're super excited about this feature and the possibilities it'll bring. We expect the 5th generation prototype to be the last one before the campaign because we have to kickstart this project eventually. Regardless, we'll keep you posted so let's stay in touch!

The ISO key is back!

László Monda
2015-04-03

Good news, everyone! After so many of you have expressed your desire for an ISO version, we finally decided to make it along with the ANSI version.

As for the Enter key, we will only provide bar-shaped Enter which might beg for some explanation.

The main reason is that bar-shaped Enter is more ergonomical. This layout also allows us to make the rightmost UHK keys shorter by half unit than on most keyboards, which makes the UHK more compact, and the keyboard halves more symmetric.

According to our experience, it's very easy to get used used to the bar-shaped Enter key. You can even swap the functionality of the bar-shaped Enter key and the "\" key above it on your UHK, making the "\" key send Enter.

Feel free to read why the bar-shaped Enter key is more ergonomical.

With or without ISO, that is the question

László Monda
2015-03-19

Update 1: We're evaluating the possibility of providing a version with the extra ISO key and another version without it based on Tömer's bridged keycap idea.

Update 2: The bridged keycap idea doesn't seem to be feasible but we're planning to make two versions, namely 1) ANSI and 2) half-ISO featuring an ISO key and an ANSI Enter. We plan to implement this by using a single, multi-purpose PCB and two different kinds of metal plates for the left keyboard half.

Update 3: The ISO version is going to happen.

Some of you told us that you want an ISO version of the UHK so we've sent out a survey and received a whopping 1,372 responses over one week! Wow! It's truly exciting to see such an awesome, active community and let me just take the opportunity to thank every one of you for participating. We think that we learned quite a bit so let us share the questions, the responses, what we learned and the road ahead.

Your suggestions

There was a text box at the end of the survey where you could enter your suggestions so let's start by addressing the 10 most popular ones.

Swap Control and Super for God's sake! - Fair enough. I intentionally diverged from the standard layout to make Control easier to reach but let's stick to the conventional layout then. It'll be updated on our site.
I want to map Control or Esc to Caps Lock. - No problem, it's perfectly possible.
I want blank keycaps - We'll provide a blank version.
I'd like ortholinear / columnar layout. - I'm personally intrigued about columnar layouts and it can happen in the future but not anytime soon.
A tilt stand would be nice for ergonomic purposes. - Indeed and we plan to make this a stretch goal of our campaign!
I want a separate numeric pad. - We don't plan to offer any but you should be able to buy one from other manufacturers.
Provide a Mac layout. - We will provide custom labels for Mac / Windows-specific keys.
Please support Linux! - Given that our primary development platform is Linux we already support it.
I need the AltGr key. - It's the same as the right Alt.
What is this Super key? - Same as the Windows key.

The questions

It's important to note that question 2 and 3 were only visible to those who choose the ISO layout in question 1.

Question 1: Which layout do you prefer?

ANSI layout (featuring a bar shaped Enter key)

ISO layout (featuring an L shaped Enter key and an extra key next to the Left Shift key)

Question 2: Regarding the Enter key...

I'm fine with the ANSI Enter key despite being an ISO user.

I'd prefer a small ISO Enter key.

Only a full sized ISO Enter key works for me. (Please note that this would make the keyboard wider, more asymmetric and increase development time substantially.)

Question 3: Regarding the ISO key (the extra key next to the Left Shift key)...

I don't need a dedicated ISO key. I'd rather map Mod+Z (or some other shortcut) to the ISO key.

I need a dedicated ISO key.

The responses

The above chart was filled out by all the 1,372 of the participants and the ISO-specific answers below were filled out by 450.

Why do people spare the ISO key so easily?

We expected those who choose the ISO layout to heavily insist to have a dedicated ISO key but oddly most of you choose the "Without ISO key" option. This clearly begs for some explanation so in order to gain a deeper understanding we looked into the keyboard layouts of various countries. As it turns out there are 3 main categories of country-specific ISO layouts regarding the ISO keys.

Relational ISO layouts

German layout, courtesy of Wikipedia

First up, it's important to realize that even though the above is the German layout, its ISO key yields the same characters as the Austrian, Croatian, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Latin American, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish layouts so we're talking about a vast number of countries.

Let's name such layouts as "relational ISO layouts" because here the ISO key produces the < relational operator in itself, > when pressed along with Shift and | when pressed with AltGr. These are rather rarely used characters and in 2 of the 3 cases a modifier needs to be pressed to invoke them anyways so the ISO key doesn't seem to be that critical for this layout. One could easily map these characters to Mod+N, Mod+M and Mod+, respectively without significantly affecting productivity, according to the following mapping:

UHK key combination	Scan code sent to the host	Resulting character
Mod + N	ISO key	<
Mod + M	Shift + ISO key	>
Mod + ,	AltGr + ISO key	\|

Backslashed ISO layouts

UK extended layout, courtesy of Wikipedia

The above is the UK layout and its ISO key yields the same characters as the Irish, Romanian and Russian layouts. In the same vein, \ and | are rarely used characters and they can be similarly mapped to the Mod layer without really affecting productivity.

Special ISO layouts

Hungarian layout, courtesy of Wikipedia

The above is the Hungarian layout and it's a special case because its ISO key yields letter Í which is part of the Hungarian alphabet. The Bulgarian layout is similarly special with its ISO key yielding letter Ѝ, part of the Bulgarian alphabet.

Even though the ISO key can be mapped to the Mod layer, in these situations this approach may be less comfortable given that we're talking about a letter of the native alphabet of these countries. In any case, these two countries only include 15 million people which is 0.2% of the population of Earth. (As a Hungarian I don't want to belittle these people, I'm merely talking about statistics.)

Summing up the ISO key issue

We think people have reevaluated the significance of the ISO key when presented with an alternative option, namely to map the ISO key to another layer. In light of this realization and according to the above the ISO key doesn't seem so critical. Some people won't be able to live without it but according to the statistics they're the minority of the ISO users.

You know what's the most surprising to us? We, as Hungarians thought that the ISO keys of all countries always feature a country specific letter but according to our research there are only 2 countries where this is the case. From our perspective this hardly justifies having an ISO key in most cases.

Do people need the ISO Enter key?

According to the statistics 64.95% of the participants who choose the ISO layout want an L shaped ISO key. It's very surprising for us because we thought that the ISO key is the main reason why people prefer the ISO layout but according to the above it's the L shaped Enter key. Also, we'd have thought that it's harder to get used to the Mod key than an alternative Enter key. How's that?

Final words

According to the above there's a need for ISO but it's not so big to justify making separate ANSI and ISO versions for a small startup like us. This doesn't mean that we won't ever release an ISO version but probably not for the first time.

We might have came to wrong conclusions here and there. As always, you're welcome to let your voice heard in the comments below.

What's in the Box

László Monda
2015-03-03

If you've checked out our site then you must already have a good idea of what you can expect to have when your package gets shipped. Regardless, we thought that we should clarify what's in the box by creating a nice illustration and listing the items one by one.

From top to bottom:

Retractable cable: 1 meter long when expanded, featuring 6P4C RJ11 connectors
Lock screw and hex key for permanently interconnecting the keyboard halves if you happen to prefer a one-piece keyboard.
USB Mini-B to A cable: 1.8 meters long
Spring cable: 0.35 - 0.65 meter long, featuring 6P4C RJ11 connectors
Left and right keyboard halves

We've already said some words about the permament interconnection mechanism, but no words have been said about the spring cable, so here it goes:

We provide an extra spring cable besides the retractable cable because some of you have expressed concerns regarding the durability of retractable cables. We've talked to a number of retractable cable manufacturers and we think we have chosen a reliable one but just to address your concerns we will provide a spring cable, too.