Hardware is not that fascinating to me in itself. Sure, lots of big companies create well-designed and quality hardware, Apple being one of the most well known amongst them, but I'll never buy their products because these devices are locked and not designed to be exploited to reach their full potential. Putting OpenWrt into my ASUS WL500GPV2 is the best example I can think of how one can make his/her device a thousand times more powerful and customizable by replacing the stock firmware. Unfortunately, it's necessary to buy closed hardware in most cases because there are not many open alternatives but this situation can change in the future and whenever I can I choose open hardware.

In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the open hardware revolution. Atoms Are Not Bits; Wired Is Not A Business Magazine has lots of though provoking arguments and Are atoms the new bits? discusses the mentioned issues even further.  I don't really think that open hardware will ever take over the world and will replace closed hardware. The big manufacturers fiercely protect their intellectual property and most consumers couldn't care less whether they can hack a given piece of hardware because they just wanna use the damn thing (with all its shortcomings, being unaware of its full potential).

Hackers are a different breed. There are a several hundred open source projects out there, the most relevant ones being present on Harkopen, Open Innovation Projects and Open Manufacturing. Reprap is the flagship project of the revolution and rightly so because it's very rare for the open hardware community to create something this complex and well working, even if the quality of the created models lags way behind the commercial alternatives. I think open hardware is not so widespread because 1) most of the projects are technical minded and aren't practical for the average Joe, 2) most creators are only interested in implementing, not distributing the projects, 3) these teams don't have any marketing / business experience and 4) the economies of scale are against us (until we conquer the world).

I definitely have to work on 3) but the Ultimate Keyboard is gonna be ready in the not too distant future. I don't mind learning non-technical stuff to make it happen.

That was the basic idea but I went further about two years ago when I realized that hand travel distance is much longer than it's supposed to be in many cases.  When writing code one's right hand must move often between the alphanumeric keypad and the navigational keypad.  To alleviate this problem I decided to map the whole navigational block to the alphanumeric block through the Windows key.

I've used the above configuration with great pleasure and it improved my efficiency for almost two years.  Unfortunately the X keyboard drivers must have been changed in the last two Ubuntu releases because my xmodmap keymaps stopped working.  I knew it in the beginning that xmodmap is outdated and XKB is the future but it wasn't really urgent to port Coder Keymaps to XKB so I didn't do that.

Due to the pressing need to use my beloved mapping I've made some efforts and had some online chat with Sergey Udaltsov who is very knowledgable about XKB.

Long story short, it seems that it's impossible to create such an exotic keymap on Linux.  Not that it's not possible to create it with XKB, but various GUI toolkits, such as GTK+ interpret the mappings in strange ways and the mapping wouldn't be consistent accross toolkits.  I'm sure that this can be solved by modifying the X keyboard driver or the toolkits but as you may suppose it's a heroic work.  Not only that, but this is an OS-specific problem and there are no standard solutions that truly work.

I finally decided to attack the problem differently by creating a keyboard hardware that has limitless power regarding remapping.  It's actually not a new idea of mine,  it's about two years old.  The prototype is in development and it's very innovative in many ways.  I've gathered a small, but knowledgable team and we're progressing rapidly.  I wanted to have a working prototype by the end of this year but I'm not sure we get there in time because rapid prototyping is expensive and the delivery of rare electronic components take time to arrive to Hungary.  But no matter how long it will take, we'll never give up.

As a result of the above I don't wanna devote any more time to Coder Keymaps.  The project has been closed.

• Mechanical Key Switch Keyboards Demystified
• EliteKeyboards.com
• Mechanical Keyboard Guide
• The Story’s Story: Keyboards

Their Optimizer layout that is used in the Matias Optimizer Keyboard really hits home for me.  The idea is very good, but they're not the first to invent such a special layout and probably neither me.  I've seen a similar layout a long time ago on a site that I don't remember, but a guy basically made a customized X Server layout with the core idea of using the JKLI keys and the Windows key as a shifting key to produce handy cursor navigation.  I've seen his work after I came up with the Ultimate layout which is similar to these layouts.  The core idea of the Optimizer layout is very good, but their implementation is suboptimal for a number of reasons which I won't talk about now because I don't wanna share the details yet.

On the other hand their Half-QWERTY layout that is used in Matias Half-QWERTY One-Handed Keyboard and Matias Half Keyboard is new to me and I haven't heard about it yet.  It may truly be their own invention although it doesn't take a genious to came up with such an idea I believe.  I think the Half-QWERTY layout works wonderfully in practice because it's easy for the human mind to mirror the keys of one half of the keyboard.  One thing that is hard to understand for me is why these products are so bloody expensive.  They sell them about $600.  One reason I can imagine that the target audience is very limited and they cannot sell many of these and want to make additional profit with these products but such high prices are very discouraging for customers I believe.

Since I'm on the mission to build the best keyboard ever created, I felt the need to disassemble Das Keyboard and see what makes it tick.  Just to make things clear, I think that Das Keyboard is the best traditional PC keyboard ever created, but not the best keyboard that is possible to create because the standard PC layout requires too much travel distance for various keys and it's suboptimal from the typewriter's perspective.  No, I don't mean DVORAK, but something that I could call QWERTY Compact that is very easy to learn.  But that's the topic of another post.

First of all, I want to apologize for some of the crappy pictures.  My friend, Dömi and I did everything we could do to make reasonably good pictures but the lighting was less than optimal and we're pretty unexperienced at making such photos.  Anyways, let's see what we have!

Back panel outside with screw holes

This is the back of the keyboard clearly showing where the screw holes are.  You have to harm the central warranty label so say bye-bye to the guarantee if you proceed further.  You also have to remove the upper rubber feet to access the screws, but you'll be able to easily glue them back later.

Back panel inside with straps

Now comes the tricker part.  There are some hooks that hold together the front part and the back part of the keyboard.  It looks like this:

A hook

I think it's probably impossible to disassemble the keyboard without breaking some of these hooks, but you don't really have to worry because the screws alone will hold the front part and the back part pretty tightly so you'll be perfectly able to use your beloved Das Keyboard after assembling it.  You have to pressure the hooks from the sides with some handy tool to disassemble the front and the back parts.

Now let's see what's inside!

The Cherry MX tactile keyswitches

After removing the keycaps (which is a pretty easy job) you can see the soul of Das, the Cherry MX tactile keyswitches.  They are both extremely durable and extremely enjoyable to type on.  I'd like to note that it's a misbelief of some people that different pressure sensitivity is required for various switches, namely that less force is needed to press a switch as the distance from the center gets longer.  Every key needs constant pressure, about 50g.  I've measured the constant pressing force by placing some coins on different keycaps.

Keyswitch panel

We have lots of those switches, this obviously does not make Das a cheap keyboard.  The switches are panel mounted, not PCB mounted.  Panel mounting is a more robust solution than PCB mounting.  Panel mounting also make Das more expensive, so think about what does this keyboard provide for its price before saying that it costs too much.

Keycaps

The keycaps are not ordinary either.  When seeing Das from its side it's easy to notice that the top of the keys form a slight U shape.  This shape is more optimal for typewriters than the much more common linear shape used by the rest of the keyboards (not counting the Model M and Unicomp keyboards).  Because of this shape, each row has to close a different angle with the base panel than the other rows.

The PCB of the board

The keys are attached to the PCB (but they sit on the aluminium panel shown above).  Most dome switch keyboards use foil, but we're not dealing with mediocre quality here.

A diode on the board PCB

Das uses diodes to implement N-key rollover.  Let me note that it doesn't implement true N-key rollover, only 10-key rollover, but it's hardly a limitation as most of us have 10 fingers.

The controller PCB

See high resolution version

The controller PCB is definitely not an ordinary one.  The left IC is a Genesys GL850G USB hub controller and the right baby is a Holtek HT82K95E USB Multimedia Keyboard Encoder 8-Bit MCU.

The controller PCB of a Trust KB-1400S keyboard

One can compare Das with this poor PTH PCB.  The complexity is not the same.

Some grease on the frame of the space bar

After using Das for some weeks I could hear some squeaky noise when pressing the space bar.  I was more than surprised because everything else was so terrific about the keyboard.  After I applied some lubricating grease to it the irritating voice gone away.  Some grease should be applied to these wires during the manufacturing process.  Apart from that I cannot say any bad things about Das.

You probably pretty much know my opinion about Das after reading this post, but let me say a word of wisdom at the end.  You can buy many crappy keyboards throughout your life or one real keyboard.  The choice is yours.  You know which I opt for.

Thanks for Werner Heuser for linking this post on Repair4Keyboard.com.

It turns out that the answer is a definite no.

I've heard about / tried the following ones: KPT-102, DTK and Everex. It's not a miracle that you probably haven't heard about anyone of them because they are all crap. Mechanical doesn't mean quality. Apart from the Cherry keyswitches and the original buckling spring mechanism all I see is inferiority.

I was especially excited to try Sony VAIO laptops. Sony's laptops are very elegant and stylish, typically designed for CEOs and other high profile people. Unfortunately this doesn't mean that it's a pleasure to type on them, quite the contrary according to my experience. Flat keys look great, but they make typewriting hard because one's fingers cannot feel their position. Apple neither has a place in the market of typewriter's keyboards with their recent flat-key models. Lesson learned.

I've tried several dozen laptop and desktop keyboards, but my findings are pretty disappointing. Tactile feedback is usually poor and laptop keyboards have much more issues in general. The most frequent problem is that compact layouts usually result in inferior usability and the inventors of these shameful creations are incredibly resourceful regarding totally messing up layouts in the most non-intuitive manners one could ever imagine. I could talk for hours about this one topic alone, but I won't dwelve any deeper into this issue now.

Another interesting aspect of the Ultimate Keyboard which I've became more aware of is the keyboard technology used. Wikipedia has a fascinating page on Keyboard technology which explains most of the things that touch typists should know about the topic.

The article Mechanical Keyswitches, Membrane Keyswitches, Scissor-Switch Membrane Keyswitches is full of insights regarding the workings and efficiency of varous keyswitch technologies. I think that mechanical keyboards are probably superior to scissor-switch membrane keyboards which are superior to ordinary dome-switch keyboards. I'm not sure but I'm gonna test it myself.

There's also an interesting article about the 10 worst keyboards of all time. It's in Hungarian, but the pictures alone will scare the shit out of you.

As a last reference there's a microswitch keyboard made by a die-hard hacker named Tim Tyler who was apparently dissatisfied with other keyboards. I can easily imagine that his keyboard is superior to 99.9% of the keyboards available in the market.

It may be a pleasure to type on an IBM Model M, but it certainly looks very cheap. Its mechanics is interesting, but I don't know any museums around here to have one to try. Maybe I'll look up some auction sites.

I've always loved the mechanics of laptop keyboards, and there are some fake-laptop keyboards for the PC, but none of them mimics the mechanics of the real laptop keyboards. Fortunately, it seems that it's possible to buy laptop keyboards and mod them to connect to other machines.

According to the little research that I've done it seems that the pitch distance (distance between keys) is 18 mm in case of PC keyboards and it's around 17 mm in case of laptop keyboards. The stroke distance (distance a key moves when pressed) is about 4 mm in case of PC keyboards and it's about 2 mm in case of laptop keyboards.

I think tactile feedback is a strong attribute of a typewriter's keyboard which is mostly a combination of stroke distance and the used mechanics. Short stroke distance may result in insufficient tactile feedback and long stroke distance may be uncomforable and unproductive because there is too much path to take for your fingers to press a key.

Unfortunately nobody has published any extensive tests about people's typing speed when using specific keyboards, so I'll try to do such a research by myself. I'm afraid it's gonna cost me much time and money, but I'm sure it's gonna worth my efforts. I'm thinking of creating a frontend for people to populate such a database. Researching this would be a cool project.

My task was complex logically, but it was also an interesting lesson from a HCI point of view. I had to often navigate in various source files and I cound't help myself, but feel that my keyboard is making my job harder than necessary. Navigation in source code is a pretty usual activity of a developer, but it was even more peculiar in this scenario. I use computers since my age of six and I found myself fed up. There are two operations that I particularly dislike:

1. Moving my hand between the keyboard and the mouse
2. Moving my hand between the alphanumeric keys and the navigational / function keys

The above operations are time consuming. The travel distance of the hand is more significant in the first case because the hand needs to travel above the navigational and numeric blocks to reach the mouse in case of a right-handed user. The travel distance is less significant in the second case, but any typewriters who edit documents find confusing recalibrating his/her hands to the typewriting position on a regular basis when navigation is needed.

Since that day of enlightenment, I brainstorm about the perfect keyboard day by day. This is a special keyboard and I don't foresee everyone using it. It has a specific nieche, a nieche of computing professionals.

The requirements for the Ultimate Keyboard are the followings:

1. Every possible interaction (be it a keypress or a pointer movement / button action) must be doable without any hand movements (moving fingers is allowed).
2. A short learning curve must be required to master the keyboard, within a week of daily, intensive use.
3. Ergonomical comfort is a must for computing professionals which must be provided by this keyboard through long hours of uninterrupted use.

I've made some research and there are some interesting keyboards, but none of them satisfy all the above requirements.

combimouse satisfies 2) and maybe 3), but fails to safisfy 1) because the right hand must move up and down in order to make any navigations with keys and change between keyboard and mouse mode. On top of that, I don't think that moving the whole right half of the keyboard is a good idea to do pointer movements. The keyboard itself shouldn't be moved.

The Ergonomic Touchpad can also do a good service when placing it on the keyboard, although some pointer actions are hard to do with it, I believe.

Kinesis has some revolutionary keyboards (also watch the YouTube videos) that definitely satisfy 3) and most of them satisfy 2), but none of them safisfy 1).

Goldtouch is another brand that I see a potential in. They seem to be more conventional than Kinesis, but I think that they know what they're doing and their keyboards may be very pleasurable to use (see YouTube video). I think their products definitely satisfy 3) and 2), but not 1).

I know most of the exact specifics, but rather wouldn't share them because I'd like to build a product out of this. I'm pretty confident that I have a correct vision that satisfies all of the above requirements and can lead to a unique keyboard that skyrockets developer productivity.

The one thing I'm not sure of is the ergonomics. I'm not sure which angle should the keyboard reside and in which height. I've talked to some of my friends who have the special knowledge, like designing and creating the exterior, designing and manufacturing the integrated circuits, but I don't know anyone yet that is an expert at ergonomics and usability. The last thing I'll do is giving up, this is too much of a challenge and is very interesting.