What’s the consensus on custom Niz keyboards? To me when I tried stock Niz there was something clearly a step down from Topre, is the custom scene improving that successfully?
And it must be so much easier for them to notice if something is missing / wrong before they ship it out.
Probably so!
I always think about some woman in that building who has looked at all of our keycaps for decades now. Someone who may not even use a mechanical keyboard daily, yet looks at and sorts keycaps for YEARS.
I could almost put keycaps on a board with my eyes closed at this point. I always wonder if I could compete for fastest mounting of a standard keycap set and win. I’ve put keycaps on keyboards easily into the multiple thousands of times at this point. Yet… I be that woman working at Signature Plastics could whoop me in a competition.
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Thought about this again. I was picking up some trash switches from CBKBD and looked at their red velvet DSA kit.
Now… I might be able to stand the thicker fonts if it was done like this render and applied to the alphas as well:
I found this on chekerboards.xyz:
That’s a photo, right? So there are new, thicker alphas now? But they’re also smaller maybe? Dunno. At least it more coherent.
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@pixelpusher There is a set of smaller alphas that look thicker you’ve seen them on the Mintlodoca witch girl sets. They are usually used lowercase only this is the first application I’ve seen them used in all uppercase.
DSA Berry Yogurt also uses them in lowercase like the mintlodoca sets.
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Are those alphas doubleshot? I guess I always assumed they were dye subbed and didn’t require new molds.
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Yes doubleshot as are the trash mods.
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Need something to plug your fancy keyboards into? Woot! has an MSI prebuilt on sale that is a pretty killer deal ($1250.00 USD) for everything that you get:
- 3080Ti 12GB GPU
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- 64GB DDR5
- 240mm AIO Cooler
https://computers.woot.com/offers/msi-aegis-rs-12tf-252us-gaming-desktop-7
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I have one (the 65%) with an alu top and PC bottom. The parts are all fine, and I rather like the sound. My only issue is that I did a complete disassembly to try a dome swap and Niz switches don’t have guiding pins for domes, so if you have to place individual domes then dome/spring alignment on reassembly can be an absolute nightmare. I went back to the original dome sheet. (and still need to reseat the spring on one key but I haven’t bothered). If I were to get another one, I probably wouldn’t disassemble the plate from the PCB again.
I have a Norbaforce that I did considerably more work on FWIW, but I didn’t have as much trouble with aligning the Topre domes.
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Fun event for a keeb meet-up. Along with solder and desoldering 10 switches the fastest. 
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I’m still trying to figure out if I should pre-order the Royal Cadet or not.
As I’ve been perseverating on it I’ve been thinking it would be really nice with a reverse color alpha set. Like the stuff 7bit was showing for R7:
btw, did R7 get even partially made? Did that story ever end? I remember SP stopped making sets because 7bit went AWOL but I never heard what was made from R7, if anything
I was under the impression nothing was made because the funds went towards the previous round, so a round 8 was needed to pay for round 7. I could be wrong, though!
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Oh man, I dig that green… I’m not sure there’s room for two of these in my house, but I might have to grab one of those new EC PCBs. But I just got GMK Olive R2… it would look so good on here oof
The internal weight is changed to stainless steel with special surface
treatment to greatly improved the steadiness.
Wonder what “greatly improved steadiness” means - guessing that’s a translation smudge. FWIW the brass weight in mine looks fantastic, even if it’s hidden most of the time 
Other changes in R2:
-
Dropping the wireless version (I mean come on it’s all about that solenoid anyway, and now you can get Niz switches instead)
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New style for the bottom weight; looks more like a Switch (or ancient Game & Watch) than a NES controller - now also features a “screen” badge with a few options for graphics, mostly looking like Pokemon screen grabs.
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Optional LED module mounts to bottom case instead of top this time; implementation looks a tiny bit weird on the inside but actually makes total sense: users won’t need to be nearly as careful opening the keyboard with that module installed, as the two heavy case halves will no longer be tethered by a tiny ribbon cable
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CK has a Back to School sale going on right now. 25% off of some of the keyboard extras they’ve had sitting in their warehouse plus a bunch of other stuff.
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Here are two actual pictures of boards with DSA Red Velvet. They give a better impression of what the smaller, fatter alphas look like.
It is amazing how Red keycaps in particular photograph so differently depending on lighting. You could almost think these are two different sets.
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Man, it’s still just not right to my eye. The fatter font is slightly more consistent with the mods, but the smaller size is now seems disproportionate. Seems like a no-brainer. Just match the size of the alphas to line up with the top and baseline of the mods. But what do I know
Some of them line up decently, like the one after the “P” (what is that supposed to be? Insert? Looks like a guy in the pool raising his hands up), but the shift icons look way bigger than the alphas
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Yup I agree. I haven’t ordered a single set with these mods because they are just not quite right.
The Oshid Amber SA keycaps may be an SA profile fit to the yellow Stellar65 Nightrunner, if you are into something like that.
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I just found out that keyboardbelle is back in business!
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Looks like Cherry are revamping the MX switch design, meet the MX2A.
CHERRY MX2A: SUMMARY
- INDUSTRY LEADING GOLD CROSSPOINT CONTACT
- BUTTERSMOOTH TYPING AND OPTIMIZED ACOUSTICS
- THE PINNACLE OF MX PERFORMANCE
I haven’t read this yet, but here’s a review on XDA-DEVELOPERS.
A picture of the switch:
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