iFreilicht

There's also G20, which I think is even lower than DSA. Not really popular, though.

Jup, TheRandomness is correct, otherwise I'd've done it already Don't give up hope yet! Thanks man, much appreciated!

Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it! Good thinking on your part, and I'm thankful for your concern. Rest assured that I've already done this. Since July, I've not worked much on this and I started to contemplate this step a couple of months ago. I'm glad to give it somebody else, I know a few people who I trust to be able to bring this to life in a professional and community-facing manner. Everybody wins in this situation

Final update. I've got some bad news for all of you. Hereby, I am stalling this project. At this point, I have zero motivation to continue this, and that means it would not become the product I wanted it to be in the beginning. Its quality could not be good enough for my standards, software updates would be delayed, as well as manufacturing and shipping, even support would be far below what one could call acceptable. Everything that you've heard about a bad crowdfunded product would be absolutely unavoidable if I tried to continue this. I now understand exactly why that sort of stuff happens, and I am very glad that I held off on running a crowdfunding campaign. Let's end this on good terms. I've started my internship to prepare for an Industrial Design Master degree, and that takes most of the energy I have every day. Everything that remains, I'm putting into my musical skills. The Iris 16 was one of the reasons why I decided to take this route, it convinced me that I have the skills and mindset to work in this field but need to learn a lot more to do it right. The only thread about Iris 16 that I'll keep updated is the one on smallformfactor.net, we'll also discuss on there if and how anyone can take over this project so that maybe Iris 16 will come to fruition in the hands of somebody else. Thank you to everyone of you who gave feedback and supported this project!

It is much appreciated! If I'm lucky, I'll get two free weeks until New Year, so that should really help me pick up the pace. Thanks a bunch! I keep forgetting that posting more often also means more people will find this thread. I should work on that as well. You're welcome!

Switches are not directional, so you can try bending the two prongs directly onto the bottom face of the switch, turn it around by 180° and solder it without putting them through the solder holes. This may not work for multiple reasons or (if you're unlucky) it may even change the feel of the switch, so definitely try it on some leftover switches before attempting anything of the sort.

So just a short note where I'm standing right now: I've started to get back into the software side of things, and it's looking better every day. There's now a python (command line) application that allows to download configurations from the Iris 16 and I'm now working on making uploading work as well. The main goal is to have most of the work done by the visualizer and the Iris itself, so that it's easy to write client applications that interface with them. This means that the firmware is starting to get close the micro's limits, I'm already at 80% Flash usage for the program code and 50% minimum SRAM usage during runtime. On the other hand, the Python app is literally 160 lines of code right now including comments, so that's pretty cool. Because downloading and installing something is not necessarily a good solution, I also looked into browser extensions. And lo and behold, Chrome actually offers API for direct communication with the serial port! So that sounds like a very good option as well. You would just install the plugin in your browser and can then directly upload and download from the web-app (which could be made downloadable as well for offline use). To make sure that all software dealing with the Iris is compatible, I've also rewritten the basic data structure in Protobuf, so that there is one standard definition of how the whole business with Cues, Schedules and Periods is to be stored and transmitted. It's already been a huge help to have this. Today I'm also doing my tax report, which goes a huge way demonstrating how much money I put into this during the last year without getting a single buck out yet. Fun for the whole family!

Oh that sounds even worse than I imagined. I also found these "landing pads". I think if @TheresaS179 got something like that, but made from acrylic or metal, she'd get the desired effect. Should be relatively simple to draw something up in inkscape and send it to ponoko for laser cutting.

Sorry guys, nothing to show. I have very little time to work on this right now, so progress has been frustratingly slow I don't even have time to visit the forums anymore, my last visit here was months ago. I'll try and free up time when my current project at work is finished.

Hm, I would've suggested putting something inside the switch, but that would require you to desolder all switches on the board. The WASD rings are indeed quite thin because they are mainly for dampening the bottom hit, not travel reduction. 0.2mm are about 7.9mil and 0.4mm are about 15.7mil, so like 8/100ths and 16/100ths of an inch. You don't have to search on WASD for O-rings though, you can also just google the specs you need. Keycap stems are a touch above 5.5mm in diameter, so O-rings with inner diameter of 5mm should work.

Every now and then a good macropad or programmable numpad is sold on massdrop, so definitely keep your eyes open on there if you want a dedicated device. What I would suggest on trying first, though, is using AutoHotKey to set your numpad up as a macropad. So every button on the numpad could be a macro function if NumLock is disabled. Cheapest and very flexible solution. That's this one, right? Love the layout on that, looks quite interesting. What do the SF-keys do on modern systems? Or is that just F13-F24? Not personally, but I can tell you what you'll need. Almost the whole keyboard is completely standard, so that's nice. However, the bottom row has an uncommon layout. The left three keys (Ctrl, Win, Alt) are all 1.5u wide instead of 1.25u. This means that the spacebar is 5.5u wide, which is extremely unusual. The only other board I know of having that is the Nopoo Choc Mini. So, when buying a custom keycap set, you'll have to make sure to get a matching 5.5u spacebar and 1.5u mods. When buying a set like this in a group buy, these mods are often in a compatibility kit, or - if you're lucky - are part of the main kit. The spacebar is tricky, though, most sets will not offer it. When you buy a set in XDA profile, you can get a 5.5u XDA Spacebar from Aliexpress. For Cherry profile, you can get a 3D-printed one from Shapeways. Other profiles, and you're out of luck. This is why people always recommend to go for boards with standard bottom rows. Makes your life so much easier down the road.

This is the #1 reason for RGB, in my book anyway. You can match the lighting to your other equipment much easier than if you had to swap the LEDs out. I do think individually addressable LEDs on each key are a bit of an overkill, though nobody forces you to use that. Damn that looks awesome. Do you have any sort of build log or parts list?

Sorry guys, been very busy lately. I'll try to help everyone best as I can! What you're searching for is a "high profile" case for a TKL board. The problem with TKLs is that they are not built to any particular standard, unlike 60% which all have the same mounting holes for the case, so you might indeed have to do some modding. Some good cases can be found here: https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=search_list&s[match]=all&s[search]=TKL&s[title]=Y&s[short_desc]=Y&s[full_desc]=Y&s[cid]=44&s[subcats]=Y&s[mid]=0 The ones from TEX are very highly regarded for their quality. However, be warned that your keyboard might not fit them, even with extensive modding to the plate. It looks like the top row on your board is closer to the alphanumeric row than usual, so the keys will not fit through the gaps in the case. All of those are pretty good. If you want superb quality you'll have to go for a custom board, but that's out of the question unless you're ready to invest a few hundred bucks Addressing the keycap concerns that others have voiced, you should consider the Ducky One TKL RGB as it has doubleshot caps instead of laser etched ones. In general that's a board you can't go wrong with. There are a few ways. Looking at your layout, the easiest would be to get a Filco MiniLA Air and then just get new keycaps. For a fully scratch-build board, I'd use lasergist. You can build the plate and case using their service. Then you can handwire the board (which is not too hard even if you're new to soldering) and program it yourself. You can get a good overview of everything here, specific tutorials for everything can be found on the internet, pretty sure you'll find something on youtube as well if you're more of a watcher than a reader. To get the exact keycaps you want, you'll have to take a look at WASD keyboards' and maxkeyboard's custom keycaps offerings. The quality of the caps is pretty bad for my taste (way too thin plastic), but the printing is good and they're the only way for completely custom printed caps. Other than that, you can always check out geekhack or /r/MechanicalKeyboards to get info about group buys for aftermarket keysets. Those are very expensive, but also extremely high quality. That's an interesting requirement. I don't know of any TKL other than the K500 that has the F-keys set up like this. But, at your budget, there's a very good 75%, the Nopoo Choc Mini. That should fit your bill nicely.

Cool, how did you get the camouflage print? Was it sold like that, did you get a vinyl wrap, was it painted? Damn, what a board. 100g is pretty darn heavy, but I'm sure the bump must feel amazing. Do you have a KLE link showing which weights are on which keys? The case is pretty cool as well, where'd you get that? Any info on the Artisan? Why did you put it on ESC instead of where F5 is now? About the Amber Alps, can you compare them to Gateron Greens by any chance?

Haha sorry, I'm cross-posting these updates on different forums and the audience is a little different on all of them. Some appreciate me going into a little more detail

If you like the aesthetic of the TK, what about the CM Masterkeys Pro L? Seems to have everything you want, and a good bonus over the Corsair Strafe is the standard bottom row, in case you ever want to get aftermarket keycaps. Getting wrist rests aftermarket is mainly good because you have a lot more choice. If you get a board with a built-in wrist rest and you don't like it (for whatever reason), you can't easily swap it out. A lot of people also prefer the feel of wooden wrist rests over plastic ones, but that's just a matter of opinion. Aftermarket wrist rests can get a little expensive, though.

Small Update Support for Cues is now implemented. Here's a short demo: It's a little hard to properly film this, I'll have to experiment a bit. In this case I tried to have the LEDs out of focus to make the colours mix better. Defusing the light with paper leads to a very strong glow around each LED and for some reason causes very noticeable flicker. Neither is visible with the naked eye, but on video it just looks awful. Filming directly alleviates this, but you can see that the bright cyan and yellow in the third animation are very washed out. A proper camera probably wouldn't hurt, either. Mildy interesting side note: This implementation doesn't use floating point arithmetic for efficiency reasons. This is important as we have to calculate a full frame as often as possible each second. The Ramp Parameter that you can set in the Iris Visualizer is not stored on the Iris 16 as a value between 0 and 1, but between 0 and the Cues duration. For every arithmetic operation I need to make sure that the intermediate result is a positive integer. So division is always the last step in any calculation as it comes with a probable loss in accuracy which would be amplified if I then executed further operations after it. Next steps in the firmware are support for Schedules and thus Periods - which means I'll need to do some work involving dynamically-sized arrays - and implementing a Mass Storage driver. When my 3D-printer arrives I also want to experiment with transparent filament for light guides/diffusers. The LEDs currently are almost not diffused at all, which makes the colour mixing unsatisfactory, and I think there's some experimentation required to get a good result on this.

I don't think those exist in PBT. You can find ABS ones on aliexpress, but front print backlit caps are already quite a niche, and backlit PBT caps are quite hard to produce because they have to be made as doubleshots and the transparent inlay is then required to be made from POM. Sorry to disappoint you.

HYPE!

Nice cable as well, where'd you get it from? My curled orange cable from Pexon was shipped today, soooo excited!

Technical Update: I finished a prototype implementation of BAM/BCM (Binary Code Modulation) and Charlieplexing on the Arduino Micro, and results are very promising! To reiterate, with Charlieplexing I am able to control all 36 LEDs individually using just 7 I/O pins. Because Charlieplexing requires tri-state logic to work properly, I can not use the built-in PWM facilities of the microcontroller, so I'm using BCM to minimize the processor overhead caused by a implementing the modulation in software. There are two main concerns when doing this, flickering and brightness. Because of the high number of LEDs, for 24-bit colour it is required to switch the state of the output pins 56 times for just a single frame of animation. Even worse, because some of them need to take much longer than others, more than 114000 steps are required for one animation frame. Additionally, each LED can maximally be on for 1/7th of the time. If the microcontroller isn't able to switch between states fast enough, the LEDs would seem to flicker and potentially be much darker than desired. But after finishing my implementation on 6 LEDs using 3 pins, it is fairly safe to say that at least flickering won't be an issue. The Arduino Micro has a 16MHz crystal, and I am able to render at a little over 320 FPS. Switching over to 7 pins would only decrease that to about 138 FPS, which is still pretty great. Additionally, Iris 16 will run at 48MHz, so thrice as fast. There's also no noticeable flickering of any sort, so that's pretty great. The only unknown now is the brightness. We'll see how that works out, but I'm pretty positive that it will be bright enough. There's actually some pretty neat stuff like manual loop unrolling and adaptive delay correction built in to my implementation that allows for these fast speeds and also makes the whole thing more accurate. Reading this back those two sound like awesome marketing buzzwords. I'll make the source code available in due time, but please understand that it'll stay confidential for now. Hope to give you some hardware updates soon, thanks for reading!

@DisguisedDemise Sounds like it's time for a 60% then

No need to, you already got a razer for that jk man, whatever floats your boat.

There are a lot of different tactile switches, but not as easy to come by. Tactile Greys, MX Clears, Zealios in 4 different weights, Matias Quiet Clicks. There are probably more but those come to mind immediately. But for most of those you'd have to build a keyboard yourself. Clears and Tactile Greys can sometimes be found in retail boards, but that's not common. And Matias switches are exclusively in Matias keyboards, which are quite expensive.

How are those QWERASD shaped keys when typing? Seems like that would be quite off-putting.