Appreciate your feedback: Wooting Keyboard

[jacobolus]

we're working on a next generation mechanical keyboard.

Can you explain why this is “next generation”? This looks like dozens of other keyboards from the past 10 years.

[jacobolus]

Okay, I looked at your website. I see your main pitch is the “analog” thing. You should edit the first post of this thread and the thread title to reflect that.

Some thoughts:

Film editing
Scrub smoothly with precise control through your edit.

Music production
Produce different sounds based on the speed and/or depth of a key press. Similar to playing the piano and pressing a key string hard or soft.

Super secure passwords
Everybody has their own unique typing behavior and input methods. The keyboard can trace this unique typing identity and recognize it’s you filling in the correct password.

For scrubbing through film, a jog wheel (or mouse scroll wheel, or trackball, or similar) is much better than an analog button.

No offense, but the super secure password thing is really dumb. Existing passwords are already hard enough, making the password need a particular typing style is going to just lock people out of their computers.

For musical instruments, analog keys are great, but not in a QWERTY/ANSI keyboard arrangement. If you want to make a musical instrument, you should make some differently shaped keyboard, designed for the purpose.

There are definitely plenty of other cool possibilities with analog switches though. Will all the switches be analog, or only WASD + spacebar? What is the mechanism? Magnets? Capsense? Optical?

I suspect your biggest problem will be the software chicken-and-egg barrier. That is, right now, nobody has analog keyboards, so there’s no reason for software to support it. Because there’s no software support, there’s no reason for hardware vendors to build analog keyboards. USB HID is going to be mostly useless for fully taking advantage of analog keys, so you’ll need some kind of custom protocol support on both ends, which is going to take a ton of work to get working across platforms. All the best luck though! I’d love to have more analog computer inputs out there in the world.

* * *

Are your renders showing the actual shape of your keycaps? If so, you have too little space between keys, and the keycaps overall are too flat and uniform, in my opinion. It’s easier to press keys accurately when there’s adequate gap between keytops, and adequate step between the home row and further rows. Standard keycap tops are larger than ideal, and were designed mostly to fit several printed legends on them, because some international keyboard layouts need up to 4 symbols printed on the top of the key. The smaller “spherical” keytops from keyboards made in the 1970s were better, as far as touch typing is concerned.

For analysis, see http://johnbear.net/symbolics-keyboard-paper/MacIvoryKeyboard.pdf

Your layout right now looks roughly like an Apple chiclet laptop keyboard, with deeper key travel. The Apple laptop board’s keytops are larger than they ideally should be, but it’s not the end of the world because they have such low travel. If you have a full-travel switch with similarly tight spacing, typists are going to end up making lots of mistakes with their fingers hitting two keys at once. The flat, unsculpted keycaps of laptop keyboards are a necessary compromise to keep them thin. If you have a normal-sized external keyboard, there’s no reason to make that compromise.

In picture form this:


or this:


is better than this:


* * *

Edit: Many, many modern keyboards get this wrong. The standard cheap backlight-friendly “OEM profile” keycaps used on “gamer” keyboards are all quite poorly designed.

Sorry if my rant about keycap shapes sounds too negative. If it seems like an off-topic distraction for this thread, and you’re stuck with some existing keycap shape, I can edit my post to chop it out.

[Findecanor]

For musical instruments, analog keys are great, but not in a QWERTY/ANSI keyboard arrangement. If you want to make a musical instrument, you should make some differently shaped keyboard, designed for the purpose.

Nah. It works great. Black keys on a clavier are 50% offset from white keys - and you get two such claviers on a QWERTY keyboard.
The QWERTY row is one row of white keys, with numeric keys being black.
The ZXCVB row is the other row of white keys, with the ASDF keys being black.

There are lots of musical programs that have this arrangement.
If you need more you get a MIDI keyboard from the start.

Will all the switches be analog, or only WASD + spacebar?

Please Wooting, ALL switches!

I'd suggest that you license Adomax FlareTech if you have not got anything better.

USB HID is going to be mostly useless for fully taking advantage of analog keys, so you’ll need some kind of custom protocol support on both ends, which is going to take a ton of work to get working across platforms.

BTW, Topre's analogue prototypes emulated a PS3 gamepad and did MIDI over USB.
The USB standard does also support a physical device being multiple virtual devices at once: so you could have a keyboard talking multiple protocols at once even though MIDI is not even a HID standard.

Anyway. I think that a good new standard protocol over USB for analogue keyboards would be very useful.
There are several people here who are knowledgeable about keyboard protocols who could contribute to it because they have written their own keyboard firmwares. I personally would love to discuss it.

Are your renders showing the actual shape of your keycaps?

I supposed from earlier discussions that they are only a placeholder for rendering.
The keycaps would be regular OEM profile.

[calderoats]

Two points:

1. Your renderings are showing a black top plate. That would mean the top plate is either black powder coated aluminum or black powder coated stainless steel, extra finish work. Therefore with finishing the top plate, expect to pay more for that as opposed to raw stainless. If you are thinking the top plate should be plastic, in my opinion don't do that, because even entry Chinese boards have stainless plates. If you want black plastic, look at the Novatouch. The plate is recessed down inside the plastic housing, and it is still steel. That would mean your rendering should show recessed switches, not standoffs.

Even better is a CNC steel housing and steel plate. But costs more and would price the board out the market probably.

2. Sooner or later, you have to mention raw basics about your switches, I mean actuation force and travel. You will make or break the board when you do that, though, so do it when you have figured out damn good marketing points. I would be turned off if the actuation is more than a MX black, for example. Most gamers are using blues or reds at 45gs. Gateron clears are even lighter.

1. Interesting, the top plate is made from aluminum, the last sample I've made was of 6061 grade. It's not powder coated but anodized. With anodization, a thin top layer of the material changes into the color, so it's not a "coating" and you can't "scratch of the painting". The current prototype uses Anodized sandblasted black, but we don't like it, so we made some different sample colors in brushed. Since you're cool, here's a picture



2. Can't wait to start talking about it. Other user made the right comment. It's not heavier than black, it's not as light as Red. Yes there are/will be different versions.

I see what you mean. We can't do it with the stock version, but if you've noticed we have swappable top plates. At a future point, If multiple people are interested in it, it would be possible to make a limited amount of top plates that have a flush blank right with the same PCB. Just utilizing fewer keys. Can't disclose more than that at this moment.

That would be ultimate! 
Will you be doing a 100% layout at any point too?

We've gotten a lot of requests, if enough people support it, there will be a 100% version.

Okay, I looked at your website. I see your main pitch is the “analog” thing. You should edit the first post of this thread and the thread title to reflect that.

Some thoughts:

Film editing
Scrub smoothly with precise control through your edit.

Music production
Produce different sounds based on the speed and/or depth of a key press. Similar to playing the piano and pressing a key string hard or soft.

Super secure passwords
Everybody has their own unique typing behavior and input methods. The keyboard can trace this unique typing identity and recognize it’s you filling in the correct password.

For scrubbing through film, a jog wheel (or mouse scroll wheel, or trackball, or similar) is much better than an analog button.

No offense, but the super secure password thing is really dumb. Existing passwords are already hard enough, making the password need a particular typing style is going to just lock people out of their computers.

For musical instruments, analog keys are great, but not in a QWERTY/ANSI keyboard arrangement. If you want to make a musical instrument, you should make some differently shaped keyboard, designed for the purpose.

There are definitely plenty of other cool possibilities with analog switches though. Will all the switches be analog, or only WASD + spacebar? What is the mechanism? Magnets? Capsense? Optical?

I suspect your biggest problem will be the software chicken-and-egg barrier. That is, right now, nobody has analog keyboards, so there’s no reason for software to support it. Because there’s no software support, there’s no reason for hardware vendors to build analog keyboards. USB HID is going to be mostly useless for fully taking advantage of analog keys, so you’ll need some kind of custom protocol support on both ends, which is going to take a ton of work to get working across platforms. All the best luck though! I’d love to have more analog computer inputs out there in the world.

* * *

Are your renders showing the actual shape of your keycaps? If so, you have too little space between keys, and the keycaps overall are too flat and uniform, in my opinion. It’s easier to press keys accurately when there’s adequate gap between keytops, and adequate step between the home row and further rows. Standard keycap tops are larger than ideal, and were designed mostly to fit several printed legends on them, because some international keyboard layouts need up to 4 symbols printed on the top of the key. The smaller “spherical” keytops from keyboards made in the 1970s were better, as far as touch typing is concerned.

For analysis, see http://johnbear.net/symbolics-keyboard-paper/MacIvoryKeyboard.pdf

Your layout right now looks roughly like an Apple chiclet laptop keyboard, with deeper key travel. The Apple laptop board’s keytops are larger than they ideally should be, but it’s not the end of the world because they have such low travel. If you have a full-travel switch with similarly tight spacing, typists are going to end up making lots of mistakes with their fingers hitting two keys at once. The flat, unsculpted keycaps of laptop keyboards are a necessary compromise to keep them thin. If you have a normal-sized external keyboard, there’s no reason to make that compromise.

In picture form this:

Show Image

or this:

Show Image

is better than this:

Show Image

* * *

Edit: Many, many modern keyboards get this wrong. The standard cheap backlight-friendly “OEM profile” keycaps used on “gamer” keyboards are all quite poorly designed.

Sorry if my rant about keycap shapes sounds too negative. If it seems like an off-topic distraction for this thread, and you’re stuck with some existing keycap shape, I can edit my post to chop it out.

Woooh! Very cool, and I totally understand where you are coming from, you never know how until you've used it. Actually, the keyboard isn't all flat, it's in stairs, but I have to be honest, we couldn't choose the stock keycap model and are limited to an existing mold. I'm connecting with Tai-Hao to see if we can offer better options for the more experienced users.

Concerning analog: Thanks for the input, I understand that there are better devices for the specific purpose, but I hope these things help to think and share how you would use it in your own situation. Also, isn't it already convenient if you can just bring your keyboard to where-ever and still have the film scrubbing benefits, music synthesizing and other things? Also, this would be a cheaper all-in-one solution than having to buy all these different devices. For amateur music or filmmakers, it's really convenient, just like the majority of Youtube creators.

Our goal is to make the entire keyboard analog but to find the right solution, it needs longer development time. At the moment, we're able to support up to 16 Analog keys without increasing the cost significantly - This is really important to us, because we aiming for a certain price range, so that everybody can get started. At first, we're focused at Gamers, so the current analog keys are: QWER, ASDF, Capslock, Ctrl, Alt, Spacebar and the arrow keys. We're probably going to change the keys a bit, depending on what makes most sense.

we're working on a next generation mechanical keyboard.

Can you explain why this is “next generation”? This looks like dozens of other keyboards from the past 10 years.

Next generation, because the keyboard has never seen any real change for years. Many have tried, but nothing has changed and we've even went back to the mechanical system. In this case, we've added another input dimension. So seeing that the keyboard already survived many generation being exactly the same, why would this not be a next generation version :)

Thanks for the input all.

[FoxWolf1]

Will all the switches be analog, or only WASD + spacebar?

Please Wooting, ALL switches!

WASD + spacebar would be a disaster, since you couldn't emulate a standard controller. You'd also make analog mouse-keys useless for people who aren't left-handed. Not to mention, the whole music thing would be doomed.

The AimPad guys made a prototype with (it looked like) analog arrow keys as well, plus Q and E for triggers, but this is still not a good configuration because there aren't enough other keys near the arrow keys, so you're basically committing another hand for just for a stick. Still not optimal for mousing, either, and you still lose the music function and anything else that needs full analog. Oh and, you also lose everyone who's accustomed to something other than WASD, like all the ESDF fans. If you're okay with pissing the ESDF people off and need to save money, QWEASD + UIOJKL + space might be a respectable compromise.

AimPad also used the caps lock key as their mode shifter, which is a deal breaker for me because of the custom of using capitalized words for emphasis in online chat. Holding shift for long words can get to be an ENORMOUS pain in the ass...but that's a different issue.

Having everything analog, even if it's more expensive, would really help the thing live up to the potential of the technology IMO.

Also, re: music: As someone who gave up the piano, in hindsight, far earlier than I should have, but who has a lot of computer keyboard experience in both typing and gaming flavors, I'd dig a computer-keyboard-shaped instrument. I should think anyone whose native instrument is not the piano would benefit similarly from the ability to leverage computer keyboard experience.

[calderoats]

For musical instruments, analog keys are great, but not in a QWERTY/ANSI keyboard arrangement. If you want to make a musical instrument, you should make some differently shaped keyboard, designed for the purpose.

Nah. It works great. Black keys on a clavier are 50% offset from white keys - and you get two such claviers on a QWERTY keyboard.
The QWERTY row is one row of white keys, with numeric keys being black.
The ZXCVB row is the other row of white keys, with the ASDF keys being black.

There are lots of musical programs that have this arrangement.
If you need more you get a MIDI keyboard from the start.

Will all the switches be analog, or only WASD + spacebar?

Please Wooting, ALL switches!

I'd suggest that you license Adomax FlareTech if you have not got anything better.

USB HID is going to be mostly useless for fully taking advantage of analog keys, so you’ll need some kind of custom protocol support on both ends, which is going to take a ton of work to get working across platforms.

BTW, Topre's analogue prototypes emulated a PS3 gamepad and did MIDI over USB.
The USB standard does also support a physical device being multiple virtual devices at once: so you could have a keyboard talking multiple protocols at once even though MIDI is not even a HID standard.

Anyway. I think that a good new standard protocol over USB for analogue keyboards would be very useful.
There are several people here who are knowledgeable about keyboard protocols who could contribute to it because they have written their own keyboard firmwares. I personally would love to discuss it.

Are your renders showing the actual shape of your keycaps?

I supposed from earlier discussions that they are only a placeholder for rendering.
The keycaps would be regular OEM profile.

.
Just want to say, you have the right attitude and thinking and would love to talk more with you. If you don't mind you can send us an email (not sure if this is allowed but) to social@wooting.nl. We're still scouting for more people that want to contribute to our project. May it be professionally or out of enthusiasm. We welcome anybody to connect with us.

Thanks.