If you have been waiting for decent renders - your wait is over! If not, I'll show you anyway
Huge thanks to elmo, not only for making these awesome renders, but also for allowing me to share them with you. If you are a keycap designer and wanna render your caps on my board, too - .fbx files (for blender) of the case have been added to the github repo. Some .steps (for CAD software) too. Feel free to use them as you wish!
I just stumbled upon your project and I think it's great. I was thinking about designing my own perfect keyboard but now I don't have to thanks to you. With the form factor, ISO and an encoder, the only thing missing would be a small OLED. but thats not too important to me. I could care less about wireless funtionality but hey why not.
I'ts so uncanny how close your design is to my ideas, so thanks for sharing! Are you thinking about making a group buy? I would definitely be interested. On the other hand, if there is anything I could help you with, I'd be glad to do so.
Thanks for the compliments! If you want to have encoder + OLED + 75%, you might wanna check out the satisfaction 75 (one of the boards that inspired me!) - sadly, no ISO plate options. The PCB supports it and ISO plate dxfs are available, though.
Regarding the groupbuy - I have about 8 boards promised to friends so far - that'll cover the 3 prototypes I won't keep (provided they work), then I'll have to see. My dream would be to find a shop who will partner with me to have them in stock. If that won't work out, I'll probably make a small, second run. Big plus of a small run: case materials can be freely chosen between POM, wood and PC for the upper and POM and PC for the bottom shell - a choice that would probably not be possible in a larger scale GB or if they should get stocked somewhere. But I wanna go step by step - see if the prototypes work and get QMK onto them is about as far ahead as I am planning right now...
The top case and layout is beautiful. The bottom with the rbg and design feels cheap. Possibly a simple angular design (thinking like a TGR Jane) may entice more buyers?
This mostly started with the idea of making my dream board reality and selling the 3 leftover protos, I did not expect the design to gather so much attention... A POM bottom shell would be no issue, and a "clean" non stepped surface could be done, but with higher milling costs. I'd prefer to stick to my design though, because that's what makes it stand out most (apart from the ISO-only). Maybe I'll just sell PCBs, and everyone can download (and edit?) edit the case files and have them milled themselves. As I said above, I'm not yet planning this far ahead. Only thing I can tell for sure is that there will not be a big GB from my side.
Pretty hilarious that theres so much flack for ISO when I have to put up with so many good builds that don't allow ISO.
This looks bloody nice, will be keeping an eye out and prepping my wallet
Thanks a lot! I hope I'll be able to offer them for purchase somehow... But we'll see once it's time for that.
I thought that there's so many super pretty ANSI only boards, ANSI users can handle a single keeb that's ISO only. Kinda weird, since we got Satisfaction, 7V and evolv which have almost the same layout and a similar (top shell) design.
They are premium boards with a price to match though, while mine is highly cost-optimised and will not have their premium looks or feel.
Fantastic looking keyboard.
Bold choice to go Iso only, and with such a geometric bottom + RGB underglow (I like it personally, despite how divisive a feature it can be).
If you do manage the QI receiver in the bottom assembly, to allow charging under the deskmat to use the keyboard wirelessly forever... you'll inspire some new boards by those enthusiasts of the clean cordless keyboard+mouse setup.
Anyone know of any other upcoming keyboards with Evolv's layout (with the dial) since it's now looking like my favourite design in terms of spacing?
So tempted, but I don't use ISO because I don't want my keycap options stunted (I feel sorry for ISO users in regards to that).
Thank you, too! The bold choice was rather easy to make, because when I made it I was only planning on making 5, maximum 10 boards for which I could easily find buyers. The bottom shell sure is the most divisive feature, but also the only one that actually makes this board stand out.
The QI/battery management part is off-loaded into a separate repo (and on a separate PCB) on purpose, my idea was to allow more designers to use them once I got everything sorted out. Similar to ai03s unified daughterboard, but focused on wireless boards (while still offering a simple USB passthrough version for those who wanna keep it wired). I originally hoped to stay within the dimensions of his board, too, but had no chance to squeeze the TP4056 + DW01 and 4 JSTs into that tiny form factor. Would have been awesome as a drop-in-battery-ification-board
...I wrote a lot again, but felt like dropping a line or two for every comment - now it's render time, though!
Blue alu top, clear PC bottom, GMK NordClear PC bottom POM top, clear PC bottom, GMK WOB
Frosted PC top, frosted PC bottom, GMK BOW