Yep I’ll do that when I go to work tomorrow, I have a scope I can use there. I’m realizing that this unmarked lipo I had might have been a 5.5v one and not a 3.7v like I thought but I don’t have a multi-meter here to check.
The controller board on the hhkb looks like it has some sort of built in OCP but clearly it wasn’t enough.
I’ll set up my 25 edition board correctly with a voltage regulator and BCP like you did instead of giving up early.
That would explain it! I Don’t know why I assumed it was a 3.7v one.
I’ve burned out enough expensive components I always meter voltages before connecting things 
Will the PC plates be avaliable to purchase separately?
Looks like all the stock disappeared :’( Just 3 Veracity Steel Pro 2 cases left. I had been keeping tabs on inventory and the three other colors had 30+ (according to how many was allowed in cart) as of a couple days ago, so it was quite surprising.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. We saw a spike of interest in the Heavy Grail last week—amusingly, after some streamer went on a rant about how pretentious and expensive and garbage he thought it was (thankfully, a very minority view)—and that actually depleted a lot of our stock, which caused me to re-evaluate the numbers. (I tend to be a little loose about inventory until the numbers start to get low.) Accounting for rejects and reworks, it turns out that we have fewer parts available than I thought, and I prefer not to pre-sell spots unless I’m pretty certain we’ll be able to fulfill them. So I adjusted our inventory estimates downward a day or two ago, and as of today it looks like we’re out of all the aluminum finishes.
Towards the end of the year once we know how many good reworks we’re going to get back, I’ll likely be able to add some number of these back into inventory for sale. There will also be some polycarb ones available on Thanksgiving.
Would the same thing apply to pro 3 veracity housings or are those completely sold out?
We tend to be much more careful about inventory counts with the Veracity since each unit is so expensive, so I’m pretty confident of the numbers there, but you can always email us if you’re looking for one and we can confirm. I know that we had to send some back for polishing rework and its possible that Jared pulled those from inventory until we were sure they would come back looking good.
Earlier this week we also set aside two Pro 2 Veracity units, which we’re going to offer as fully-built, hand-lubed units with the HHKB components included and installed (black keycaps).
Care to share who the streamer was? Totally understand if you don’t, I’m just curious. We got your back tho.
Haha. Thank you! That is enormously kind and much appreciated, but I would never ask for anybody to defend me, certainly not out of any sense of loyalty. I know my personal style (some awkward combination of wonkily cerebral and sappily sentimental) is surely distasteful to some. And apparently that is emphatically true of unrealkeyboards, which (to answer your question) is the guy’s twitch handle.
I hope you’ll forgive this over-artful (though entirely sincere) sort of humblebrag, but I always meant and expected the Heavy Grail to be a deeply polarizing design, so I have been astonished—and frankly somewhat puzzled—by the uniformly effusive praise it seems to have gotten. I could cite many highly-opinionated intentional design decisions I made that seemed poised to confound the expectations and rile the sensibilities of some: natively supporting only HHKB sliders rather than third-party or other uncommon ones (doing so provided the best fits and tolerances for what is by far the most common use case), unorthodox bumper sizing and placement (a reverse-engineering challenge of keeping the housing geometry elegant and not overly bulky while still accommodating the breakout PCB profiles of two different models), and many other choices that favor a slim design that looks and feels best in everyday use at the cost of a slightly more fiddly build process (a mildly challenging few minutes buys us what is meant to be a lifetime of tasteful use), etc. And yet so far, after hundreds have shipped to clients all over the world (and the rest shipping soon), everyone has seemed totally into it. 
(For examples, see this very thread, all the client photos on Instagram, and the quotes on the top of the product page.)
But as an admirer of the Stoic philosophers and generally world-weary pessimist, I tend to get uneasy when things seem to be going too well. I figure if everybody seems to like what I’m doing, then I’m probably simply not doing anything creatively interesting or technically ambitious. So I was actually pleased to see that the Grail had finally acquired a hater. And I originally thought about posting the VOD here to explain—not debate—some of the design decisions that the streamer fellow didn’t like. But I decided just to let it drop, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the principal complaint in the stream implies that the board he got had a serious functional defect (USB port not lining up), which he ascribed to a QC problem but was actually just due to a simple assembly error on his part. As a result, the video gives an overall factually wrong impression of the design: namely that it simply doesn’t work. So I wasn’t keen to perpetuate that misinformation.
But secondly, and more importantly, I have subsequently been told that the stream is quite negative and vitriolic towards me in a personal way that has nothing to do with the board, which started much earlier in the stream. As his build goes poorly, he finds more things to hate about the board, and he suffers a visible and strikingly emotional meltdown. I wasn’t quite aware what I was stepping into when someone told me to join the chat and try to get the bottom of what the tantrum was about (a strong word, perhaps, but if you watch even a little of the stream I think you’ll deem it accurate). We might have been able to work out his assembly error, his misunderstandings about the design, and any potential QC issues for which we might have needed to send him a replacement part, but my joining the stream only made him more furious, with him saying “Fuck you, Ryan Norbauer. We don’t love you.” And then shortly thereafter just abruptly ending the stream before we were able to get to the bottom of his assembly error or his other complaints. (As I like remind everyone, we can have QC misses like anybody else, and if anybody doesn’t adore something they’ve gotten from us, we’re always eager to refund or replace it.)
The reason I’ve resisted jumping publicly into the fray on this matter is that I figure there are only two plausible explanations for such a wildly emotional meltdown in response to a few hiccups in a keyboard build: 1) there is something much deeper going on here and he just hates me personally for some unknown reason or was simply having a really bad day or 2) he is just intentionally edgelording (thanks to @choobies for explaining this zoomer concept to me), using my name and a popular product to raise the profile of his channel. The former case deserves only empathy/sympathy and the latter our admiration for its excellent business savvy (it didn’t escape my notice that the meltdown video has 5x the views of his normal streams).
In any case, I’m glad at least one person finally really hates the Heavy Grail.
For the many of you who still seem keen to contend with these MAJOR ISSUES, I hope to have a few more in stock soon. 
I would honestly pay extra to have the “F**k You” message ironically CNC-machined into my housing lol.
Edit: Looks like Cartier just announced a “We don’t” edition of their Love Bracelet.
Haha. As a pretty morose and self-hating person in general, I’d even sign up for a board with the second half of the quote. Like the vanitas paintings of yore, a little reminder of humility in our daily workspaces is probably a good thing.
Talk to me one on one so we can hash this out. Until then I would appreciate you not speculating about my intentions and feelings about you publicly.
Were both of those vods taken down or renamed? I wanted to see what the complaints were.
It doesn’t appear he renamed or took anything down to me - there are 3 full streams from last week titled “The ULTIMATE Heavy Grail Build!” (first - second - third) in addition to a couple of official highlights (Heavy Grail Issues with Deskeys Sliders - Major Problems with the Holy Grail)
Oh gotcha, I haven’t used twitch enough to realize that the screenshot above were highlights and not VODs. Hopefully the finish on my board doesn’t look like that but honestly, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Everything else seems easily solvable or not a real issue but I just skimmed through.
Has the whole thing with the board vibrating/rocking slightly when you hit the corner keys because the feet are “too soft” bothered anyone else? Been using my Grail for nearly a month now and never even noticed until Buddy brought it up.
Buddy is somewhat of an expert when it comes to modding Topre keyboards. It’s even a service he offers where he’ll mod your board for a fee. Considering he’s touched and typed on so many Topre boards (probably more than anyone else in the world), I think he’s uniquely qualified to notice something like this.
I will say that him losing his shit over incorrectly installing the breakout PCB was comedy gold. The ultimate irony is he’s been advertising Heavy Grail assembly services on Reddit.
It is a widely known principle among physicists that if you intentionally forcefully poke an object with your finger that it will move, even on Twitch.
But, just to check that we hadn’t missed something important, when I heard about this we checked two TGR and Keycult boards we had on hand and noticed that if you poke at them, they also, naturally, do the same thing (with even less apparent force). And this is, of course, no slight against those excellent boards.
It reminds me of the old joke “Have you heard the old story about the man who goes to his doctor and says, ‘Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this.’ The Doctor says: ‘so don’t raise your arm like that.’”
My Heavy Grail still sounds like raindrops and I love being pretentious. Who cares?
We’re a bunch of outliers brought together by the absurd joy of spending quite the number of hours and dollars on making for ourselves input devices that feel and sound a particular way, and recall memories and histories that the rest of the world have agreed they can do without. There’s little time to waste on tearing ourselves apart, I should think.
P.S. Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox is a rather good read if you’re interested in demystifying the network of meanings the word seems to find itself in these days.
