Now this is awesome to see, fairly fleshed out customizer and knowledge of layouts/keebs and layout options.
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Wow, multicolor legends and color? That’s pretty cool.
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How’s Keyreative doing on delivery times these days? I’ve seen mention of a really long queue a couple of years back.
For example, someone on the Geekhack KAM Astha IC mentions not having bought them in a couple of years because they were waiting 3 years for a set and have been burned on quality.
If they’re running well, though, this is really attractive. I gather many in the 40s community buy their KAM sets.
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Hope this pans out. Need more colors and ability to preview though.
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That’s really neat and a good step in the right direction. I hope it only gets much better from here. There are some things that could be improved:
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How to effectively create a 64-key layout? Or just add specific keys to customize a given layout? It seems the only workaround is to find some other superset layout that includes everything you need, but then that seems a bit wasteful for something that should be highly customizable.
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More colors would be great. For example, there are no dark greens at all.
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More powerful editing tools, such as a way to batch edit the formatting of multiple keys simultaneously. Legends can be moved around, but sometimes getting the alignment right just seems to come down to eyeballing things.
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So, I don’t know whether to put this here or in the Things that make us go hmm… thread, but you know the Tecsee Honey Peach linear switches with the stem with the metal pole? There is a tactile brother, the Tecsee Crystal Lemon.
And yup, they’re pretty much what I expected.
(Also, in case anyone else was curious, the metal does not appear to be ferrous, or at least my magnets don’t seem to stick to it. So no hilarious hall effect mods by magnetizing the pole.)
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Also spotted on AE, tactile and clicky magnetic switches from Outemu
They appear to use some kind of metal leaf to make the bump/click – in fact, it looks like the same mechanism for the brown vs. blue, just the blue is set closer together, so it snaps back more (and thus ls audible). They appear to be the same mechanism in Outemu Snap switches.
Definitely curious about tactile hall effect switches.
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While I would love fully custom Pantone color code options, I feel like that would quickly become unmanageable for Keyreative. I’m just imagining trying to have QC on literally any possible color combination in existence for one set runs all day…
The “Pick colors” step does allow you to preview both a photo of the Pantone color on a keycap and what the whole board will look like in the layout preview, with the ability to set colors for both label and keycap for each individual keycap, if you so desire:
I’m honestly surprised by the huge amount of customization available here. You can even choose individual colors for the labels, sub-labels, and even sub-legends.
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Yea it is surprisingly in-depth.
I believe the backlog is cleared; from what I heard, there were huge disruptions to their manufacturing due to COVID lockdowns. I was waiting for KAM Superuser for (I think?) 2.5 years.
They’re claiming delivery in 10-20 days:
This is the universal struggle of the 64-key layout. My first board was a GK64 and I was not expecting how difficult it was to find base sets that worked with the layout. It’s gotten better in the past couple years, but still not perfect.
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I agree that what they have is a good starting point.
My “more color and preview” comment was direct feedback after having tried making Space Cadet with it. After all the settings are configured, I didn’t feel confident I’d get what I wanted. Lack of Cadet sub-legends is fine as, unlike colors, fonts and designs of dyesub keycaps are not difficult to add.
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Honestly, the more I dig into this tool, the more impressed I am with it. It does appear that you can customize the text/symbols used for the sub-legends, as well as the placement of the various labels and sub-legends, which I found somewhat surprising:
That said, I definitely agree that even after painstaking work to do the entire keyboard, I don’t feel confident that you’d convince anyone it was GMK Space Cadet.
I really hope this does well for them and they expand the available colors and types of keyboards you can cover like the aforementioned 64-key layouts and even completely custom keyboard arrangements and spacebar sizes (looking at you, 1.25u spacebar on my Day Off 60).
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So jumping off from this tool, does anyone know of a place to source blanks in sculpted profiles but nonstandard widths (e.g. R4 1.75u in Cherry or SA)? Ideally, they’d be PBT, but first things first.
I’m set up to do mediocre but serviceable legends for arbitrary layouts, but I’ve only done DSA and XDA so far.
Would this 132 keycaps, blank, white, PBT, Cherry profile set work? Widths aren’t listed, but seems like it could do the trick:
Edit: also available in Cherry black plus MDA white and MDA black
So it is an unusual problem to have, but what trips me up is always the kitting that’s built for normal human keyboards — the final picture shows it.
For a simple example, R3 only has the two 1.5u keys, so if I wanted to play around with a 1.25 R3 key to squish backslash a little, I’m stuck going back to non sculpted profiles. It’s not so hard to get R1 caps in whatever width you’d like, but it’s (understandably) hard to shop for something more exotic. Some molds may not even exist.
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Good thing I don’t need a Salvation. At $200 it is awful tempting.
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$186 for A stock at AshKeebs. Shipping could be higher though depending on where you live. Only the GB colors (NK has the post GB ones), but they are all in stock.
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The 65% is going to launch soon I suppose it makes sense that they would try to sell off some surplus of the 60% boards
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I agree. I paid $222 for mine and feel like I’d be very happy having paid up to $300.
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Space Cables already has a pre-order up:
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