Colors and Wood



Right now, we have two colorways planned and set (these will definitely run):

Black and Walnut
E-White and Maple

We’re thinking about also working in a forest green colored aluminum case, but that could pair well with both walnut and maple. If you’re interested in something like this, let us know in the IC form!

Both the maple and walnut wood are sourced from the USA, but made in China. Surprisingly, even with tariffs, and shipping back and forth, it’s still cheaper to get these wooden pieces made in China compared to the price if they were made in the USA.

We are considering some other options though. In the past, we’ve collaborated with functional.co to create some amazing wooden keyboards. He has been kind enough to make some wooden pieces for us out of Pacific Northwest figured maple and Purpleheart wood.

Unfortunately, I don't yet have photos of these wooden pieces - but early next week, you can expect this IC to be updated with photos of them!

We would love to offer a version of Soleil with wooden parts made wholly in the US out of these parts - but we would also love to hear from you! What colors do you think they pair best with? Would you pay a premium price for these American-made wooden parts?

We’re also thinking about getting the aluminum parts also made in the USA. They’ll be quite a bit more expensive than the ones made by Hongtu. How much of a premium would you pay?

>> We would love your feedback about Soleil here <<



Pricing

We’re aiming for a price of $450 or less for this board. This includes wireless PCB, solar panel, 5 wooden pieces, 2 aluminum pieces, a plate and all the usual trimmings. If the interest check shows a lot of interest - maybe we can price at a higher MOQ and bring the price down!



While this keyboard doesn’t have any brass, the wireless functionality, battery, solar panel, and wood parts all add extra costs compared to a normal fully aluminum board.

Prebuilts






We think that Soleil might also make a great gift - and if you don’t want to build your own, we’re thinking about offering build services or pre-built Soleils. The price would go up, but we would likely offer some sort of discount to people who choose to build with us. Would you be interested in this? Let us know in the feedback form!

>> We would love your feedback about Soleil here <<


Next Steps
Sadly, the battery cavity on the prototype units is a bit too shallow for the production 780 mAh batteries, so we are waiting on getting some replacement, smaller batteries specifically for these prototype units before sending these units out to content creators.

We've already adjusted the case, and verified that the production 780 mAh batteries will fit with our revisions.

The PCB has been developed and tested - I even measured current running from the PCB into the battery in order to ensure that the solar panel and harvesting chip were indeed charging the battery. The firmware is done, and already runs on ZMK Studio.

We're aiming for a Fall 2025 launch for a Soleil group buy.


Thanks


For this keyboard, I really only helped facilitate, shared my opinions, helped write the firmware, and tested things.

I gotta give a ton of thanks to Gondolindrim for coming up with this idea and developing the PCB, and James for actually designing the board. As well as the CannonKeys team for their help in getting all the beautiful real photos you see in this IC.




>> We would love your feedback about Soleil here <<

>> We would love your feedback about Soleil here <<



About the Soleil

The Soleil is a solar powered wireless TKL keyboard. Inspired by the solar powered nature of trees and plants, beautiful wooden accents are integrated into the design.

This keyboard started as an idea from Gondolindrim. He came to me with an idea to make a solar powered wireless keyboard, so that the keyboard would charge itself, thus needing external charging seldomly, if at all. He had already picked a TKL layout, done calculations to make sure a solar panel over the arrow cluster could sustain battery usage in sunlight, and had basically done all the hard work to ensure that this idea was worth pursuing.

With a layout and PCB in hand, I asked James (of AKB fame) to take a stab at making a case for this PCB. We decided together that due to the solar-environmental motivation of the project, wood needed to be integrated into this board, and James did the hard work of actually designing something that works well with the looser tolerances of wood.

The end result is Soleil - an absolutely stunning mixed-material wireless keyboard that can fully self-sustain with just the power of light.



Solar Caveats

The math and real world testing has shown that under average office lighting, the keyboard is&nbsp;just shy of full autonomy. This means that under the average office lighting, you probably will need to charge this keyboard at some point.

However, ambient light conditions will vary greatly. Homes have less light than offices, which have less light than outdoors. If your office happens to get a lot of sun, there’s a chance the keyboard will self sustain! But even if the charge from your ambient conditions can’t sustain usage entirely, the solar charger will still extend the battery life of the Soleil.

The Soleil has a 780 mAh battery and uses ZMK (and supports ZMK Studio). Given how Gondo designed the PCB to be power efficient, and the efficiencies driven by ZMK itself, the battery should last 10 months (usage dependent), without any solar power. With that in mind, even with a trickle of solar power, those 10 months should easily be extended to a year or even more.

Additionally, because the Soleil is designed to be solar powered, it&nbsp;requires a battery to be installed. This is different from most ZMK-powered boards, which will work just fine without a battery as long as they’re plugged in via USB. This is due to the solar harvesting system, which requires a battery to be plugged in at all times.

While it would run counter to the purpose of this keyboard, if IC results show that people want to use this without a battery, we can provide a wired PCB option.


Wood Caveats

Wood is a natural material that expands and contracts with humidity, temperature, and a bunch of other factors. The wood parts may not be perfectly flush with some of the other metal parts depending on current conditions. With that in mind, the keyboard is designed to work around this. The variance in wooden parts will not impact the usability or feel of the board. But if you’re expecting wood parts to be perfectly flush to the 0.1mm, you’re in for a bad time. That said, we do expect the wooden parts to have a good finish, without any deep scratches, chips, or gouges.



An example of the fitment variances expected with wooden parts



Why didn’t we use stabilized wood? The whole idea of this board is to lean into nature. Every single wood piece is going to be different, and we wanted to keep more of a natural finish on the wood as well. Stabilizing wood also adds to costs, and we want to keep this reasonably priced. To us, it’s acceptable to lean into and embrace the natural properties of the material and design around it, versus trying to fight against it.

I'm more into digital games, but I do play a bit of Catan and Ticket to Ride when friends bring them over.

What is the recommendation for monitors these days? I know TP4 will have opinions on this.

I'm thinking of a 1440p OLED, but there's only one or two models that are 24". Everything else is 27". I'm not sure how much refresh rate matters above 144hz (what I currently have).

Also, I'm not sure if ultrawide would be a good idea. I currently have a triple monitor (all 16:9) setup on monitors arms, but I never use all three monitors for games (I tried it once out of curiosity, but the setup was annoying, and everything looked really bad because it was so stretched with peripheral things appearing too close).

This is what I'd get, but it is very suited to my specific uses of immersive solo gaming and movie watching:
https://www.newegg.com/samsung-ls32bg852nnxgo-32-uhd-max-240-hz-odyssey-neo-g8-va/p/N82E16824027121?Item=N82E16824027121
https://www.newegg.com/msi-mpg-321curx-qd-oled-32-uhd-240-hz-metallic-black-rgb/p/N82E16824475451?Item=9SIAFVFKFD3528

also got dang expensive