Very nice. Good taste.
Navy case the right move. I always thought DCS SMRT would look good on my navy Neo80.
BTW I bet it would also look good with the yellow accents on those clear / yellow Classic-TKLs.
4 Likes
Ah - looks great with the yellow. I went blue but may do a switch out. What I need is another set of alphas!
3 Likes
My wife wanted a green board and CannonKeys has the Savage65 on sale so she picked one up along with Strawberry Milk keycaps. Switches are lubed and filmed Ink Blacks out of her old keyboard.
10 Likes
The EC Agar came in a couple days ago.
Then came the show down.
The EC Naevies are interesting. They feel lighter than the 45g Silenced Topre in my R3, but just as tactile, snappier possibly. Topre has more resistance at the bottom, like they don’t want to stay compressed. The Naevies are happy to be collapsed like the domes are thinner or something. The 660C is on a whole other level. It has the oldest of the domes, but it was also manufactured during the Chinese era of the boards, and the domes have always been more tactile than stock 45g Topre to me.
12 Likes
So the Naevies are relatively light-weight but snappy? That’s good.
I found the FC-series of ‘45 G’ Topre domes to feel heavier than required. The Naevies could be a nice alternative. [Still waiting for 35 G, though.]
1 Like
Decided to finally commit to taking apart the HHKB Pro Classic and lubing it…and now I am wondering why I took so long to do so. I love the sound of this thing even more now. I did not add silencing rings or anything like that, simply lubed it and moved on.
So, going to be using this for awhile and probably take it into the office since I’m now there three days a week.
5 Likes
After experiencing non-silenced and silenced Topre, I’d go non-silenced any day. I’d even be okay with them not being lubed as long as the crazy loud stabs were.
2 Likes
When I was still messing with Topre I found using the thinnest possible dampening rings to be a really nice middle ground between silenced/unsilenced. The stabs though, definitely need lubed IME also.
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This is what I did in my future Topre build, I used thinnest 0.2mm DES silencing rings to have a bit of auditive feedback on the upstoke.
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And here we go. About as done as it’s going to get for now. Remap is done, thought the AliExpress MCU kept barfing out a stack overflow every time I tried to set up a macro, so everything is basic keystrokes until and unless I want to dive into troubleshooting; I assume I put some line or other in the wrong place.
I still think I came up with some pretty useful cross-platform stuff for my dual-boot system, which is more in Linux these days. While I didn’t retain the calculator, I tried to map the calc keys to hotkeys in the Windows 11 calculator, then also remapped my Qalculator app in Linux to use the same ones. Finally, I decided to step up my game with the insert card and design something in Inkscape that would show all the nonstandard mappings, particularly because goodness knows how long it’ll be before I come back to this board once the next shiny thing catches my eye. The White Alps are nice. I don’t think this board was used heavily. They feel a bit like what I assume people wished Cherry Blues felt like.
9 Likes
Back to basics today. Rebuilt my Minila Tofu Redux with HMX Su Purples. I also Sharpied the brass plate to black it out. Looks kind of terrible if you pull off the keycaps and look at the plate, but honestly you can’t see it at all once built. Weighs in at 1.5kg / 3.33lb.
I really despise tray mounts nowadays. I put some orings under the screws and polyfilled beneath the PCB in addition to the thin Tofu case foam–it actually sounds okay without ping or resonance now but doesn’t sound foam-dead either.
11 Likes
Since I put Des v1 greens in my HHKB Classic, it has been stuck on my desk. I’ve been enjoying the typing feel of these domes a lot. Maybe I’ve forgotten how good bke/heavy domes are after only having 35g OEM domes in my other boards.
8 Likes
Dunno if it would be useful for you, but I heavily use the QMK OS detection code in my daily driver keyboard builds. My use case is pretty mild – automatic switching of layers based on detected OS, which I use to swap Win/Alt for Opt/Cmd.
The one other place I’ve used it was for an emoji macro pad, typing out stuff like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Since Unicode input is incredibly OS specific, it’s super useful there.
Anyway, you could use the same trick to swap layers based on OS and have different keymaps based on which was connected.
Here’s an example from my Dorp CTRL’s custom keymap on Github, in case its useful to anyone. Note: you will also need to either add a rules.mk file in your keymap directory with OS_DETECTION_ENABLE = yes in it, or add "os_detection": true to your keyboard.json file.
This looks incredible assembled! Also serious love for the BAE.
3 Likes
That functionality would actually be extremely helpful for this build, especially for the calculator keys. It took me way more time than would be strictly reasonable to find a Linux calculator that could be mapped to use the same shortcuts as the Win 11 calc.exe (Qalculate GTK version, btw). On my last two projects however, I have looked at how to set up QMK for a completely new build, and do it for RP2040, and both times I gave up and used KMK. 
My emoji key is just Win+Dot, and IIRC Windows and Linux are closer to compatible on Unicode than Win and Mac, but I could be mistaken.
Yeah! The Focus Battlecruisers are neat boards and this one was not too yellowed or dirty to save. Very wide, of course, but they feel balanced and less imposing (which can also be a good thing) than the 122-key IBMs. If you look at the main F6, you can see where I had to replace a keycap with one from a different Focus board that was not in great shape. Same profile and basic color, luckily, but clearly a different batch. Those keys are going to be used a separate project somewhere down the line.
1 Like
It definitely can be daunting, though the move to the “data-driven” configuration helps make it somewhat less intimidating. Feel free to copy from my super basic setup here for a board where I was using the Waveshare RP2040 thing. You’d just need to replace the rows/cols arrays with what you’re using.
2 Likes
My second build of the TKD Cycle 8.
Started off with JWICK Blacks + GMK Oblivion → now built with Ergo Clears and 21KB.
Currently spending 10h+ at the desk working on my Master’s Thesis so switching the keyboards around makes it a little more fun.
10 Likes
Looks great! I also totally get the inverted bottom row for concave Cherry.
1 Like
Playing in the budget end today. I’ve had this RK96 sitting in a box for well over a year (got it for $25 with a missing 2.4Ghz dongle), but finally found something to do with it. QX SA mix-n-match with a “blue alert” sort of thing going on. The WOB, you can barely tell it’s translucent if the backlight is off. The “klein blue” is bit more obvious, but I really like the shade, and it works nicely here, I think. I have the “emerald green” as well, to match my aesthetic white whale of the Air Force One comms terminal in Seattle, but it had way too little contrast with the WOB and didn’t look good. Nice enough on its own, but it’s going back to Amazon. With the backlight on, there’s a pleasant enough subdued pudding effect, but you can also see some of the gaps inherent in their double-shot process, and it is a bit awkward on some keys.
Switches are Kailh Speed Navy that I got on sale at Novelkeys. I think these are maybe the switches that finally move past my personal inflection point of “heavier is better.” I still like them, but not as much as Box Navy, and maybe not as much as Box Jade. Sound is fun, though. The RK96 is just a steel plate that’s tray-mounted in an ABS case, with a clever reverse-mounted assembly that includes the 1800 blockers and volume controls, which consist of a microswitch and roller encoder. I took out the cheap plate foam and cheaper case foam to just let the click-flag fly. It is impressively loud. Stabs were pre-lubed with something, but I didn’t notice anything major and any ticking is going to get obliterated by the caps and switches, so good job, RK.
Next, I took out the battery. I have no reason to believe there’s anything wrong with it, and in fact my daughter has one of these as well (which she doesn’t use, LOL), but I am just not going to use it wireless. Finally, the RK software is a hot mess, with no support for remapping in the Fn layer, but it does let you overlay a “real” key on top of the Fn key, so combined with relying on the on-screen or an additional keyboard/numpad for the rare occasion I need to turn off NumLock, it should work okay.
5 Likes
