Repair for the win

2015-11-03

UHK fully disassembled

The UHK is durable, super durable - and adding to that innate strength, it’s highly hackable and repairable. Contrary to the attitude of most keyboard manufacturers, we believe that you should have full access (and ease of access) to tinker. Keep reading for a complete picture, or click through to the campaign page for more UHK info.

The UHK differs from usual keyboards in a number of ways. You can tell by starting at the back of the board.

UHK keyboard halves viewed from underside

There’s a lot of content here, but I’d like to highlight something specific. The wrench icon:

Durable and repair icons on the back of the case

It says “Repair friendly”. This is not something that companies usually like to put on their products - and there are a number of reasons why:

Psychology - The first question that this icon may trigger in customers is, "Oh, crap, is this product gonna break?!". Which is ironic if you think about it, because everything breaks eventually. Nothing lasts forever. To combat this reaction, we put a Durable icon next to the Repair icon because the fact of the matter is that we designed the UHK like a tank.
Future profit - If a gadget can be repaired, that means that when something goes wrong, you don’t need to just go out and get a new one. As profits and sales numbers are the single most important focus to most companies, most companies are very averse to repairability.
Extra work - Helping customers repair their gadgets takes support resources. So rather than be creative, and make it easier for customers to conduct their own repair, most companies strive to make repair as difficult as possible.

The above mindset leads directly to the following image:

ewaste dump

Image is courtesy of TheConversation.com

But there’s a better way! It’s actually possible to design for repair in a number of ways, and some of ours are pretty unique. We can:

Print instructions right on the circuit board! "Unscrew the 5 large screws below the keycaps and the 1 screw on the PCB" - it’s hard to get any clearer than this.

Repair instructions on the UHK PCB

Print similar instructions on the case.

Repair instructions on the case of the UHK

Display not only component types, but also their value, right on the PCB. See the 10 ohm resistor, and the 0.1 microfarad capacitor.

UHK PCB labelled

Little things like the above go a long way, but we’re planning to do even more - like creating a repair manual and repair videos.

In addition, one of our most innovative concepts is to log the number of keypresses for each UHK key-switch. This way, you can keep track of the wear on each individual key as they approach their 50 million keypress lifespan, so you know which will need to be replaced before they even get close.

iFixit said that "Above all,

[the UHK] is proof positive that even compact, performance-designed, single-purpose gadgets can be designed for repair, from the ground up - complete with repair documentation".

This feedback makes us very proud and assures us that we’re on the right path.

Layout matters

2015-10-27

Make use of both thumbs!

At first glance of the UHK, the layout may seem relatively standard - but we’ve packed in a lot of special features that really make a huge difference in productivity. Read more about it below!

Did you know that touch typists using regular keyboards all around the world only use 9 of their 10 fingers? That’s because we are heavily conditioned to use either our left or right thumb to press the space bar, leaving the other thumb unutilized.

UHK keyboard layout with Mod and Space highlighted

Please note that the UHK Space layout (the Space and Mod keys are swappable/remappable).

The thumb being our strongest digit, a traditional wide Space bar is just a huge waste. But with a split Space bar, we can put our second thumb to use for anything we want - like switching layers. In the UHK factory settings, the Mod layer is right at your second thumb.

How does the Mod layer make your life easier? Apart from housing navigation keys, it give you easy access to convenience shortcuts!

UHK keyboard layout with the the navigation cluster highlighted

Chances are that you use Alt+Tab hundreds if not thousands of times on a daily basis to switch windows. You may not notice it, but this shortcut is slowly stealing your time. People typically bend their thumb beneath their palm to reach Alt and also leave the home row! What if there was a better way?

On our factory keymap, Mod+D invokes Alt+Tab. No awkward thumb bending, no leaving the home row. Even better, just as when you hold down Alt and press Tab many times in sequence to switch to the next window, you can keep Mod pressed and press D many times in sequence to do the same. You can also compose with Shift to switch backwards. But this is just the tip of the iceberg! Let’s see the other convenience shortcuts, too:

Mod + D → Next window ( Alt + Tab )
Mod + W → Previous tab ( Ctrl + PgDn )
Mod + R → Next tab ( Ctrl + PgUp )
Mod + E → New tab ( Ctrl + T )
Mod + C → Close tab ( Ctrl + W )
Mod + S → Previous workspace ( Ctrl + Alt + ← )
Mod + F → Next workspace ( Ctrl + Alt + → )

Don’t like all of these shortcuts? Feel free to remap it! Also, for those of you using a Mac, we’ll have a Mac-specific preset layout with shortcuts using the Cmd key.

And that’s it for today, ladies and gents - have a great day!

Current event: The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard will be demoed tomorrow (Oct 28, 2015) at the Hackware v1.2 in Singapore. Join the event to see it in action!

Tilt, tent, and screw with the UHK

2015-10-23

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard gives you options!

Most keyboards don’t have a lot to offer in terms of ergonomics. But with the UHK and our new stretch goal, a super-high-quality palm rest, you’ve got tons of them.

Take a look at the palm rest set up in various arrangements, starting with the flat setup:

flat-stand

Tilted setup:

tilted-stand

Tented setup:

tented-stand

András is quite serious when it comes to durable mechanical design. So much so that the base of the palm rest is a solid stainless steel sheet. We surely don’t expect people to wreck this anytime soon. As you can see, the palm rest also comes with a set of legs which can be set in various configurations. It’s up to you which set-up is most comfortable.

You can even screw in your UHK.

We’ve heard from a few people who love the UHK because it will help them handle their disabilities. One creative backer even suggested that they would be attaching each keyboard half to an armchair. In situations like this, we’ve got you covered!

Mountable case

The keyboard features four threaded stainless steel inserts per keyboard half

As far as we know, the UHK is the first keyboard to use stainless steel mounting inserts. These are perfect for screwing your keyboard into almost any situation.

If you’re mounting your beloved keyboard (like to an arm-chair) and need a little more room than the provided cable can allow, not to worry! We’ve got you covered here, too. You can use any standard telephone cable. A while back, I even tried a 20 meter (66ft) long cable. Check it out:

ANSI or ISO? Which keyboard layout is more ergonomic?

2015-09-09

Lately, I've written about the ergonomics of the "6" key and given the vast popularity of that post, I decided to compare the ANSI and ISO keyboard layouts in the same manner from an ergonomics standpoint. Let's start with ANSI.

As you can see, the keys of the home row on which our fingers reside in touch typing position are filled with red. There's a thick red line in between to show the center of the keyboard for measurement purposes. I also painted Left Shift and Enter in green and Backslash in blue because these keys differ on ANSI vs ISO.

Now let's take a look at ISO.

(Please note that we won't provide a full-blown ISO layout, but a half-ISO layout featuring the extra ISO key and a bar-shaped Enter key.)

Now we have an extra ISO key painted in yellow, but Left Shift and Enter got farther from the center of the keyboard which is a bummer given their frequent use. How much farther, exactly?

	Enter distance	Left Shift distance	Backslash distance
ANSI	6	4.5	6.75
ISO	6.75	5.5	4.5

Based on the above, it's hard to argue that ISO is more ergonomical. Enter and Left Shift is pressed at least hundreds, if not thousands of times per day and they're about 1 unit (20 millimeters = 0.8 inch) farther from the center on the ISO layout. Backslash is closer by 1 unit and there's an extra ISO key but they aren't that frequently used so it's not a great tradeoff.

Regardless of ergonomics, many of you have made it clear that the ISO key is a necessity for you and some of you are too used to the L-shaped Enter and aren't willing to unlearn your muscle memory. I get it, we're creatures of habbits.

On the other hand, it's also interesting to see that a fair number of people use the opposite standard that they should be using based on their home country. For example, I as a Hungarian should use ISO but using ANSI. On the Hungarian layout the ISO key translates to "í" which is a Hungarian accented character, but I write Hungarian text almost solely with US characters, without accents. Also, as a developer, I strongly dislike that my native layout unnecessarily remaps dozens of characters like !, @, # compared to the standard US layout.

How about you in this respect? Let us know in the following poll until it's open!

Where should the "6" key be?

2015-08-14

Some of you have told us that we're doing it wrong, because the "6" key should be on the right keyboard half, not on the left. In reality, the situation is more nuanced than that, and the placement of the "6" key was a conscious design decision on our part.

US people are taught to press the "6" key with the right index finger, but not all countries are created equal. For example, in Hungary, we're taught to press "6" with our left index finger. Go figure!

Let's examine this issue from an ergonomic standpoint. On the following picture, the keys of the home row on which our fingers reside are painted in red. There's a bright red line exactly between the left and right block of these keys. The "6" key is painted blue. As you can see, the bright red line is rightward of the center of the "6" key which means that given its position, it's more ergonomic to press it with the left index finger.

Now let's take a look from an aesthetic standpoint. Here's the actual UHK layout where the "6" key is on the left keyboard half.

And here's the alternate layout featuring the "6" key on the right keyboard half.

It's apparent that the former layout is way more symmetric.

There's even more to this topic; You're welcome to read the relevant thread on Deskthority which I started a while back when thinking about this issue. Those folks know a thing or two about the ergonomics and history of keyboards.

Good bye, retractable cable! Hi there, cord cable!

2015-08-03

Building a solid piece of hardware has always been one of our topmost priorities and we're about to announce the most important news in this department to this day: We're ditching the retractable cable in favor of the cord cable.

UHK with cord cable

Over time, we've contacted multiple retractable cable manufacturers to find reliable cables and got samples from multiple sources. Despite the wide variety of retractable cables, these things have been failing on us like there's no tomorrow. Sometimes the springy mechanism got loose, other times the electical connection failed, but regardless, all of them died eventually.

Some of you have voiced your concern in this respect and as a response in our What's in the Box post we let you know that a cord cable will be provided next to the retractable cable but it doesn't make any sense anymore to ship an extra cable that surely breaks in the short run. According to our understanding there's no way anyone can manufacture a reliable retractable cable at this price point and the market does not tolerate a higher price so there are no reliable retractable cables on the market.

When we were at Prezi some of the folks over there told us that we must not be serious about using retractable cables. Given that yet another cable failed us there, that was the turning point. We're fully confident that this change will benefit everyone involved. Heck, probably even our image got better now that the retractable cable doesn't spoil it!

Yet another good news is that you'll be able to use any cross-over 4P4C RJ11 telephone handset cord or telephone line cord as a replacement. Such cables are in wide circulation and accessible to everyone for pennies.

Let us take a last look on the retractable cable because we won't ever see it again.

UHK with retractable cable

Rest in piece, you unreliable piece of crap.

Introducing the factory reset switch

2015-07-29

As the saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility". This is especially true in the case of the UHK.

You are given the great power of reconfiguring this keyboard in all kinds of wonderful ways, but you can also abuse this power. Imagine binding every key to the letter "A" and setting it as your default keymap. As you might imagine, you end up with a keyboard that is practically useless. Time to meet the factory reset switch!

The switch from the distance

The switch up close

The switch on the PCB

Upon pressing it, the keyboard loads the factory keymap that is stored in the flash, ignoring the default keymap that is stored in the EEPROM, leaving you no way to make your keyboard useless.

I think this is one of the small touches that can make or break a product in some situations.

iFixit gets behind our repair-friendly design

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

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.

Introducing the first mountable keyboard

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:

Mountable case

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

Mountable case with the PCB exposed

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

Mountable PCB

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!

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