tech talk

Module PCBs assembled

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

First things first, we’ve finally delivered every UHK, including the ones with non-black cases! If you want to order a UHK, possibly with a non-black case, now’s the time. New orders ship in a week.

As for the modules, we keep making progress. Each of the module PCBs has been assembled since our last update.

Key cluster

The main key cluster PCB didn’t create any unexpected surprises.

His little brother, the key cluster trackball PCB, however, has proven to be more difficult.

The surface area of this board is merely 1 square centimeter or 0.15 square inch. This is not a whole lot of room for a dozen components, and we can’t make it larger due to the lack of space.

The PCB fab kept rejecting this board because the components were too close to the edges. The only solution was to use smaller magnetic sensor (which detect the rotation of the mini trackball). 

We ended up using a sensor with the HVSOF5 footprint, which is ridiculously small compared to the other components we use. I’m waiting for this part, and it’ll be quite an exercise to solder it. But I’m ready for the challenge, and so is my new microscope.

Trackball

The trackball board came out pretty nicely. It’s also completely useless, unfortunately.

While soldering the parts, I realized that the pinout of the ADNS-3530 optical sensors is backwards. The datasheet features the “top side” of the component, but as far as we’re concerned that’s the bottom side. Unlike trackballs, regular mice probably use this component in a reverse-mounted fashion, hence the misunderstanding.

Istvan has redesigned this board, and it’ll be fabbed soon.

Trackpoint

There’s not much to say about the trackpoint PCB. I haven’t found any issues yet. I think it’ll work well once I write firmware for it.

Touchpad

The touchpad PCB has turned out pretty well, too.

This board is hardly our final iteration though. Azoteq, the manufacturer of the IQS572 touch sensor IC that we use, reached out to us and offered to review our design.

They made suggestions on how to improve the ESD immunity of the design, but perhaps even more importantly, they suggested to use a finer pitched sensor matrix to improve the resolution and increase the sensing area of the touchpad.

We plan to implement their suggestions, and then we’ll send some samples to them for further review. The sensor IC is very sophisticated and has a myriad of configuration parameters, so having it tweaked by Azoteq will be extremely helpful. Azoteq provides the best support I’ve witnessed so far, and I’m very impressed by them.

As previously mentioned, we don’t have an ETA on the modules yet. We keep making progress, and we’ll announce the ETA when the time comes.

Your tweets

You guys keep sending your awesome tweets, and we’re always eager to read and feature them! If you got your UHK, please share your love!

We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and are looking forward to talking to you on 2019-10-10.

Module PCBs are ready

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

István, our PCB designer, has been on steroids, and he finished the PCBs for every module! The boards are being fabricated right now, and are expected to arrive in a week - at which point I’ll assemble them.

We already showed an inside look of the key cluster module in an earlier post, so this time, I’d like to showcase the right-side modules. I’ll feature three images per module: the assembled version, the half-assembled version, and the latest PCB which is being fabricated.

Please note that the following modules are only prototypes. Their color is not representative, and neither is their surface quality, which will be way smoother once the modules get injection-molded. The color of the PCBs will also differ, as we’ll use black soldermask for the final boards.

Trackball

The trackball only has a single PCB. It utilizes the ADNS-3530 optical sensor, which happens to be the most compact optical sensor according to my knowledge. The retaining ring can be removed by rotating it counter-clockwise, so one can easily clean the ball.

Trackpoint

The trackpoint is composed of two boards. The top board is provided by our supplier and contains the actual trackpoint module. The bottom board is designed by us, and its purpose is to do protocol translation between the PS/2 protocol of the trackball PCB and the I2C module protocol of the UHK.

Touchpad

The touchpad module is composed of two boards. The bottom board is a trivial one which simply routes the pogo pin header to an FFC connector, supplying power and data to the top board. The top board does the actual sensing using the Azoteq IQS572 touchpad sensor IC. The top side of the touchpad will be covered by black film.

When I said that that the boards are ready, what I really meant is that these boards should be fully functional. Their design is not set in stone yet, but we expect only very minor changes going forward. Even our mechanical design is fairly advanced and should contain the mechanical features needed for injection-molding.

As I previously mentioned, we don’t have a solid ETA on the modules yet. As you can see, we’re making rapid progress, and we’ll get there, but we surely won’t rush them, as we want to get them right.

Your feedback

You guys keep sending your awesome tweets, and we’re always eager to read and feature them! If you got your UHK, please share your love!

We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and are looking forward to talking to you on 2019-09-10.

Key cluster and trackpoint module progress

TL;DR: We’ve been making progress with the key cluster and trackpoint modules. New orders ship in a week, except non-black UHK cases.

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update! Let’s get right to it!

Production status

If you want your UHK shipped in a week, you should pick the black UHK case option. Otherwise your order will take longer due to temporary parts shortages. This shortage was mentioned in our previous monthly update, and we’ve been working on resolving it, but it’s taking more time than anticipated.

If you have any questions about the ETA of your order, please do read the delivery status page. We keep this page up-to-date, and we’re unable to provide more accurate information, not even if you email us.

Module progress

In our previous monthly update, I included a picture of the development board for the key cluster module. In the meantime, I’ve also written firmware to drive it, so here comes its obligatory demonstration:

From a technical standpoint, the BlackBerry trackball is an interesting little beast. The ball itself is not even electrically connected to the PCB. Instead, its four spindles rotate when pushed in the four directions. The spindles contain magnets which alter their magnetic fields about 9 times during a 360 degree rotation, and the alternating magnetic field is detected by the hall-effect sensors on the PCB.

Given its limited resolution, the BlackBerry trackball is hardly an ideal device for controlling the mouse pointer (right-sided modules will perform far better in that department), but it’s very well suited for scrolling in every direction. I’m actually surprised how well it’s already working, even though it’s the first working prototype. Over time, we’ll make the acceleration and speed of the mini trackball configurable, which will make it even more useful.

As far as the firmware goes, firstly, I slightly extended the UHK module protocol responsible for the keyboard halves and modules to communicate with each other. This allowed for the transmission of not only key states, but also pointer movement information. Then I wrote a driver for the BlackBerry trackball purely using interrupt handlers, which is the most efficient approach there is. Finally, I made the key cluster transmit the pointer movement information of the BlackBerry trackball to the right keyboard half which is the brain of the UHK.

The above pictures feature our most recent mechanical key cluster prototype. The creation of a working PCB is underway.

We’ve also made a mechanical prototype of the inside of the trackpoint module:

We may change the trackpoint component depending on various design constraints, but the overall mechanical design is expected to be close to final.

We’ve actually made progress with every one of the modules, but haven’t yet prototyped the others. We’ll be sharing all their juicy details in our upcoming newsletters.

Your feedback

You keep sending your nice tweets which we’re grateful for! Please keep them coming!

We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and we’re looking forward to talking to you on 2019-07-10.

New orders ship in a week

TL;DR: We caught up with pre-orders, and new orders ship in a week! Our customers made some awesome carrying cases for their UHKs. The UHK mouse mode is surprisingly useful, and viable for creating digital art. We’re making progress with the key cluster module.

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update! Ready for warp? Let’s punch it!

Production status

We’re thrilled to say that we’ve finally caught up with pre-orders, and incoming orders now ship in a week!

There are two exceptions regarding order parameters, though. If you want your UHK shipped in a week, you should pick the black UHK case option and a non-blank keycap printing option. Otherwise your order will take a bit longer due to temporary parts shortages. Feel free to check out the delivery status page for more information.

Please note that the order numbers have been removed from the delivery page. If your order hasn’t shipped yet, it’s because of the above exceptions. According to the delivery status page, you can shoot us a mail to change your order parameters to expedite delivery.

DIY UHK carrying cases

Some of you shared your DIY UHK cases, and they’re so awesome that I ended up writing a dedicated blog post about DIY UHK cases. I’m very impressed by these cases, and I’m sure they’re of interest of many UHK owners.

Creating digital art with the UHK

There are few keyboards with a dedicated mouse mode, and the UHK might just have the best implementation of all. Brandon Yu’s drawing is a testament to this.

I’m super impressed by Brandon’s work, and wouldn’t have ever thought that anyone would create such a beautiful drawing purely with the UHK.

The UHK mouse mode will never be as good as a dedicated mouse, but it’s surprisingly capable in the right hands. This is due to the implementation of the mouse pointer acceleration and its number of configuration options.

Key cluster module progress

We’ve been making progress with the key cluster module. András got the latest CAD model 3D printed, and we’re glad to say it’s more robust than ever.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some electronics prototyping.

On the right side, you can see a breakout board designed by SparkFun, featuring a BlackBerry trackball - the kind of mini trackball that will be put into the key cluster. It’s wired to an old hand-soldered UHK left half. The left half of the UHK is just like a module from an electrical, firmware, and protocol standpoint, so it’s a great development board for modules. The design of the key cluster PCBs is in progress, and this is the whole Frankenstein keyboard on my desk:

(Yes, my UHK is backlit. We’ll release a backlight upgrade kit eventually.)

I also started to extend the firmware, and created a dedicated project for the key cluster module based on the firmware of the left keyboard half. The two projects contain a lot of duplicate code right now, so I’ll be gradually extracting the shared code to a module API which will be consumed by all the modules.

Your feedback

You’ve been sharing more than your fair share of tweets over the last month. Thanks so much, and as always, please keep them coming!

We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and we’re looking forward to talking to you on 2019-06-13.

Shipping is about to resume

TL;DR: Delivery temporarily stopped due to the shortage of packaging material which should resume around February 20. We expect to ship every non-module preorder by the end of March. Regarding the ETA of your order, please check out the delivery status page, including its FAQ section.

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update! Let’s get right to it!

Manufacturing progress

Since our previous monthly update, we’ve built plenty of UHKs, but we couldn’t ship most of them due to a temporary shortage of packaging boxes.

It’s taken more time for the printing factory to get up to speed after new year, and they expect to deliver the packaging boxes to us on February 20. We’ll make quick progress once the boxes arrive, and expect to deliver every non-module preorder by the end of March.

We didn’t simply ask for another batch of packaging material to be honest. We redesigned the boxes because they weren’t sufficiently robust. The new boxes are not only fancy, but more robust (and more expensive).

I added a news section to the top of the delivery status page which you’re welcome to check any time. This way, you can keep informed about delivery status the easiest way possible.

DeveloperWeek cancelled

In our previous monthly update, we told you that the we’ll exhibit at DeveloperWeek in the Bay Area on February 21-22. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to make it.

The reason is that our marketing contractor was fired, because I found his work ethics to be poor. Without him, we can’t staff our booth, so I ended up cancelling the event.

With the event cancelled, we won’t be able to give away the free passes offered in our previous monthly update. I’m sorry about this, but now that we have cancelled the event, we can’t do anything. I’ll email all of you who asked for free passes shortly after publishing this update.

As far as the project is considered, I think not attending to DeveloperWeek is actually a good thing. We should fully focus on the delivery of preorders at this point. We’ll have plenty of time to do expos later.

Module progress

Robi has implemented the kboot bootloader protocol natively in Agent. Previously, Agent used the external blhost command line utility which was unreliable. This will make firmware updates more reliable which is very important because the modules will require a new firmware version flashed to your UHKs. We have yet to release a new Agent version that contains this improvement.

In the meantime, András advanced the mechanical design of the key cluster module, so it’s closer to the final design to be mass produced.

As stated in earlier updates, we can’t fully focus on the modules yet. Only after shipping every non-module preorder and transitioning to on-demand manufacturing will be able to make heavier progress regarding the modules.

Your feedback

Mikko Ahlroth wrote a very nice UHK review on his blog. I love reviews like his which go into details and capture many facets of the UHK.

In the meantime, Brett Terpstra has been exploring the wonderful world of custom keycap sets. He pimped up his UHK, and wrote a blog post titled The addictive hobby of customizing mechanical keyboards.

We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and we’re looking forward to talking to you on 2019-03-14.

Lunar UHKs, Unicorns, and the Freeze bug

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

TL;DR: Please update to the latest UHK firmware for macro support, and to help us fix the freeze bug that plagues recent firmware versions. Agent now visualizes secondary roles. We’ve churned out 6 mini batches since our last update. The development of the modules is going slowly while delivering the pre-orders, but we’ll switch to high-gear afterwards.

Update to the latest firmware!

If you’re reading this and already have your UHK, please flash the latest 8.4.5 firmware by selecting the .tar.bz2 file from the "Choose firmware and flash it" option in Agent > Firmware. This will result in many goodies over the factory-flashed 8.2.5 firmware, including macro support and numerous bug fixes.

The only gotcha is the freeze bug. Recent firmware versions cause occasional freezes on some UHKs. This is a longstanding bug, and the only reason we haven’t yet fixed it is because we can’t reproduce it. That’s why we need your help! The more people who use the most recent firmware, the easier we can fix the freeze bug based on your feedback.

If your UHK freezes, please be sure to report it according to the freeze bug issue. No worries, you can always downgrade to 8.2.5 to regain stability.

Fancy UHKs

If you’re a regular reader of our monthly updates then Max is no stranger to you, as he’s on a never ending quest to pimp his UHK. This time, he used the Godspeed Cockpit keycap set to customize his UHK and in his true style, he shared the gory details on Reddit.

In the same spirit, Richard was also busy, and ended up creating the most unicornish UHK with extra rainbow flavour!

Secondary role visualization in Agent

Dual-role keys are powerful. When tapping them they trigger their primary role. While holding them and pressing other keys, the secondary role kicks in. The UHK has always supported dual-role keys, but Agent hadn’t visualized them. Thankfully, this has just changed with Agent version 1.2.9.

Now Agent can render quite complex scenarios, such as a scancode featuring modifiers and a secondary role. This makes the rendering engine of Agent complete, so you can take a look at any layer and know exactly what each key does based on its visual representation.

As an added bonus, we’ve made modifiers show up according to your OS, so for example, Super is Command on OSX and it’s the Windows key on Windows.

Production progress

The 6 mini batches we have produced over the last month have not constituted our fastest pace, but they’re in line with our recent progress. Manufacturing progress occasionally suffers a bit due to a number of factors. For example, our palm rest supplier was on vacation recently, and had to catch up with production. Such cases only cause temporary hiccups, and they can occasionally affect the sizes of mini batches positively or negatively, but we always manage them quite well.

In the meantime, we’ve already pre-ordered the parts of the second large batch of UHKs. The first large batch contained 2,000 UHKs, and the second large batch contains 1,000 UHKs. We’re not VC-funded and fully rely on your support, so being able to pre-order the parts of a large batch is a big achievement for us. This means that production will be uninterrupted in the future, even after delivering the pre-orders. A sincere thank you to every one of our backers for making this huge milestone possible!

Development progress

As you can see, we keep pushing Agent and the firmware, but it’s quite a challenge to do heavy R&D these days because production and related tasks are so demanding.

Customer support is time consuming, as well as developing and fine-tuning backend systems. These tasks are not visible from the outside, but they’re absolutely necessary to keep things going.

Transitioning to our own webshop did end up heavily affecting our backend systems, including the integration and implementation of the webshop, factory automation, order fulfillment, and invoicing systems. Pre-ordering the parts of the second large batch also called for a procurement system which is up and running, but it has taken quite some time to set up.

Due to the above, we could only make a little progress with the modules. András has further refined their mechanical design, and will hand them off to a mold designer to finalize their mechanical features. I figured out how to optimally panelize their PCBs and factory-flash their firmware the most efficient way. We’re mindful about the modules, and will switch to high-gear once the delivery of the pre-orders is over.

Thank you for reading this update! We’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and we’re looking forward to talking with you on 2018-10-12.

How can I type accented characters with my UHK?

We get this question from time to time, and the answer is not as obvious as one might think. I'm about to explain it in-depth, but first, I'll give you a short answer in case you're in a hurry. Please consider the relevant tooltip of Agent:

Hopefully, this explains what to do. You're welcome to suggest better phrasing in the comments, but this is the short and sweet version. And now on to the more detailed explanation.

Characters vs Scancodes

The most important thing to understand is that USB keyboards (the UHK included) do not send characters to your computer. No, Sir. They send scancodes. When you press a key, a scancode of 1 to 255 gets sent to the computer. It's not a character but a number!

Now think about this: There are 255 different scancodes that must be mapped to more than 100,000 characters that are used on planet Earth! How so? This is how:

Your operating system translates scancodes to characters based on your actual operating system keyboard layout.

Let me give you an example to make you realize the crucial role of your OS layout. Let's say that an American, a German, and a Russian user purchase USB keyboards of the same physical layout. Now let's take the semicolon key according to the American layout. On all three keyboards, when pressing this key, the scancode 51 gets sent to the computer, yet, the character ";", "ö", and "ж" appear on the screen of the American, German, and Russian users, respectively, merely because they use different OS keymaps.

When it comes to mapping scancodes to characters, the situation is actually slightly more nuanced because modifiers also affect the mapped characters. For example, on the US layout, Shift + 4 produces "$", and on the Hungarian layout, AltGr + U produces "€", but this doesn't alter the nature of the beast.

Alt codes

There's a mechanism called "Alt codes", which allows users to produce various accented characters in a way that is (mostly) independent of the current OS keymap.

  • On Linux, press Shift+Ctrl+U, which prefixes your cursor with an "u", indicating that a Unicode number is now expected. At this point, enter "2764" followed by Enter, and ❤ will magically get inserted. Linux Alt codes are the most powerful and standard, given that they're backed by Unicode numbers.
  • On Windows, first, you have to have Num Lock enabled. Then, hold an Alt key and press a Windows-specific numeric code, and finally release the Alt key, at which point the relevant character will be included. 375 different characters can be included this way, but there is a way to unlock additional Alt codes to be able to access otherwise non-typeable Unicode characters
  • On Macintosh, there's also a similar mechanism that is better called Accent Codes. Let's say you want to put an accent to the "o" letter. You press Option+E, then press "o," which results in "ó". The set of characters that can be produced this way is similarly limited as on Windows, although in true Mac fashion, the implementation is much more intuitive.

Alt codes provide a way to output various characters in a way that is mostly independent of the current OS keymap, but they're OS-specific, and they don't work in every environment. For example, let's say that your hard drive is encrypted, and you have to type a password before the OS boots up. Depending on your OS, Alt codes may not be available at this point. On Linux, they also can't be used in terminals outside of the X server, so you can't rely on them in every environment.

Alt codes on the UHK

Given that Alt codes are sequences of keystrokes, they're ideally suited to be assigned to keys using UHK macros. For example, you can bind the Alt code of "é" to Mod+e. UHK macros are very handy since they're saved to the on-board memory of your UHK and always available without running special software once you set them up via Agent. I'm about to elaborate on implementing Alt codes on your UHK.

The macro editor of Agent is very intuitive to use, and based on the above, one should be able to create macros that implement Alt codes. There are some gotchas, though.

First up, Alt codes are OS-specific which will pose a problem if you use multiple OSes. If so, you'll have to create all your Alt code macros for every OS you use, and then create OS-specific keymaps in Agent and bind the macros of the respective OSes. This is clearly laborious, but there's no way around it. We won't implement USB fingerprinting in the UHK firmware to detect OSes because it's fundamentally unreliable.

The second gotcha is that you won't be able to compose Alt codes with modifiers. Imagine holding Shift, then typing Alt code key sequences, then releasing Shift. Modifiers clearly mess with Alt codes.

Third, some Alt codes are dependent on the state of your OS. You have to have NumLock enabled for Windows Alt codes, and Mac accent codes are dependent on the OS keymap in use.

Accented characters in Agent

Some of you were wondering why Agent doesn't offer or display accented characters. This is one of those features that seem like a no-brainer from a user perspective, but in practice, it's not only incredibly hard to implement but cannot be implemented properly. Let me tell you why.

In order for Agent to expose accented characters, it must be aware of the current OS keymap. Being a cross-platform application, it'd have to query the actual keymap on Linux, Mac, and Windows. A quick search reveals ways to query this information (often rather obscure ways) via OS-specific APIs, but I have found no way to query the actual mappings between scancodes and characters, which is critical.

Without the exact per-key mappings, Agent would have to have a database of every single OS-specific layout, such as "French (Bepo, ergonomic, Dvorak way, Latin-9 only)" or "Russian (Ukraine, standard RSTU)". We could extract such a database from the relevant Linux packages, but these layout names are not standardized, so they're inconsistent across OSes, and the mappings surely differ in some ways.

The bottom line is that it'd take huge resources to implement the above, and we'd end up with a half-assed implementation, given that a perfect implementation is practically infeasible. Even if we were able to implement this perfectly, I don't think it would be a good idea. I can foresee users complaining that they set up the é key in Agent, then plugged their UHK into another machine (featuring a different OS keymap), and the é key suddenly became a semicolon. Users should actually understand how things work when it comes to this topic.

Scancodes vs Characters in the UHK

When remapping UHK keys, you should keep in mind that:

  • Agent accepts characters:
    • In regular actions, Agent implicitly translates characters to scancodes according to the en-US mapping (and also back whenever it needs to show the corresponding label).  (So the saved configuration contains scancodes.)
    • In macros (the Text and Command action), Agent just leaves characters for the firmware to interpret. (So the saved configuration contains characters.)
  • Internally, the UHK works with the macro Text and Command actions as with regular text (i.e., characters).
  • However, the UHK always produces scancodes.
    • For regular actions, the configuration already contains scancodes, so the UHK just sends them to the computer.
    • If the UHK produces scancodes based on macro text (i.e., based on characters), the UHK translates them back to scancodes according to en-US mapping.
  • The OS transforms scancodes (received from the UHK) back to characters according to its current language keymap.

That's it, folks! If you're still reading, then you're truly one of the brave few. Any questions, feel free to shoot them in the comments.

Custom scancodes

You can specify custom scancodes on the UHK. See how.

Production and module progress

Important: Please make sure that your shipping address is up to date! You can change it on your Crowd Supply account page. Please also check out the delivery status page.

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

TL;DR: Since our last update, we’ve sent out mini batches 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. This is the highest volume we’ve produced so far, but not as high as we ultimately aim for. We’ve fallen behind with pre-assembly due to the aforementioned staffing issues, but we’re catching up, and the ramp up is still underway. The development of the modules is in progress.

First up, let us share a beautiful and very original picture that we love very much. It’s made by Yukio Miyamoto. He is a masterful illustrator who also happens to be an awesome backer of ours.

Your recent feedback

The feedback you keep giving to us continue to be amazing.

The following is an interesting one. Did you know that when armed with a USB OTG cable, you can connect your UHK to your Android phone, and you can probably also control the mouse pointer? (Recent Android kernels tend to support USB mice.)

Lastly, this one made us laugh out loud:

Please keep them coming! We’re excited to hear about y’all.

Module progress

Production does keep us busy, and we can’t yet devote as much time for development as we’d like to, but we’ve made some progress with the modules.

The following is sitting on my desk, and it might just be the weirdest keyboard ever.

But most importantly, this Frankenstein keyboard is a proof of concept! This is 1 UHK right half and 3 left halves interconnected. The top left half simulates a left module, and the top right half (which is a left UHK half) simulates a right module.

The keyboard halves and modules communicate via the main I2C bus of the UHK. The right UHK half is the I2C master which initiates all communication on the bus. The rest of the devices are I2C slaves. From the standpoint of the firmware, there is no difference between the left keyboard half and the modules.

I basically dremeled a protoboard to size, and created a passive 4 port 4P4C hub out of it to interconnect the pieces. Then I added test keymaps for the modules, and reflashed the firmwares of the left module and the right module, so that their I2C addresses don’t clash with the I2C address of the left UHK half.

This proof of concept works as intended, and now I can type on all the 4 keyboard halves, making me seem like I overcompensate for something.

As you can imagine, this is the first step of many to follow. Next up, I will extract the part of the firmware that will be shared across the modules and the left half, and then create separate firmware projects for the modules, utilizing the extracted code.

Then I’ll attach the peripherials specific to the individual modules to these development UHK left halves, and write firmware code to drive them.

In the meantime, András will finalize the plastic cases and mechanical design of the modules, so that they’ll be optimized for manufacturing. This will, in turn, enable me to design the custom PCBs of the modules.

In a way, developing the modules is like developing additional products - 4 products to be exact, and even though we’ve gained a lot of experience, realistically speaking, there’s no way the modules will be ready by the end of August as originally planned.

Given the above, we’re changing the estimated delivery date of the modules to the end of December which should be more realistic. None of us are happy with delays, but we’d much rather take our time than compromise the quality of the product even the slightest bit. According to your feedback, it’s the right thing to do.

Thank you for reading this update! As always, we’ll be keeping you updated on all things UHK, and we’re looking forward to talking with you on 2018-07-12.

Production is up and running

Important: Please make sure that your shipping address is up to date! You can change it on your Crowd Supply account page. Please also check out the delivery status page.

Hi there, and welcome to our monthly status update!

TL;DR: Our factory is up and running! According to the aforementioned delivery page, we’ve already sent out the first mini batch, so some of you should get your orders within days. Given our most recent production data, we’ll be able to deliver batch 1 of 2,000 UHKs and related accessories by the end of July. Many of you will get your orders much faster depending on your place in the queue. Everything’s looking great, and we’ll be transitioning to the modules soon.

Some UHKs of mini batch 1:

Manufacturing progress

Launching mass production wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, which wasn’t really surprising after all. Given our past experience, some things inevitably go wrong despite our best efforts.

We observed that some LED segments displayed gibberish - that is, unidentifiable characters. It was quite a challenge to figure out the root cause of this, but András succeeded. Apparently, the space is very tight around the FFC cable and when the case is on, it bends the cable and some pins don’t connect. The solution? We just have to bend the FFC cables in an M shape prior to assembly.

We also noticed that some pins of some through-hole components, most notably the keyswitches and the 4P4C connectors, weren’t soldered in on some boards. We talked to our PCBA supplier who told us that their selective wave soldering machine had been misbehaving and got serviced recently. They will also use a 3-dimensional automated optical inspection machine from this point forward which should greatly reduce defects. The problematic boards will be reworked.

Then we were faced with a couple of bent plates. We have yet to figure out how these plates could possibly bend, but for the time being, we’ll do heavier QA until the cause is revealed and eliminated.

And lastly, a critical piece of launching manufacturing is our custom developed order fulfillment and manufacturing execution system that I’ve been working full steam on in the last couple months. It felt like building a runway while the plane takes off, but the runway has been built just in time, and now the plane is in the air.

Given the above issues, we started up slowly. According to our most recent measurements based on actual production data, we will be able to ship about two mini batches per week, which equals about 120 UHKs and related accessories. Given this pace, we’ll be able to deliver batch 1 by the end of July, so this is our current delivery target. Of course, many of you will get your orders way faster depending on your place in the queue.

Agent and firmware progress

Starting with the latest firmware, it’s now possible to wake up the host computer with a touch of a key. The LED display also gets disabled when the host sleeps to save power. See the firmware changelog and releases.

Agent got a shiny new desktop icon, it now displays the firmware versions running on the halves of your UHK, and can recover UHKs with broken configurations. See the Agent changelog and releases.

Going forward

The next big milestone is clear: the modules. The modules clearly differentiate the UHK from every other keyboard in the market, and make it the first and so far only modular keyboard ever created.

Personally, I can’t wait to control the pointer in various ways in a finer grained manner without leaving the home row, and I know that a lot of you share our enthusiasm. I’m sure the journey will be just as exciting as getting there, and as always, we’ll make you part of the journey via these updates.

Thank you for reading this update! The next one will be published on 2018-05-17. In the meantime, feel free to keep checking the delivery status page of your much awaited UHKs.

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.

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