There are split keyboards, where the left and right side of the keyboard are attached by a cable. There are innovations in ergonomics like columnar spacing, where the Q, A, and Z keys are in a straight line. They sound like a machine gun, and it’s awesome.Īn entire community has grown up around putting these MX-style switches into custom designed enclosures for the perfect typing experience. The blues are clicky and are somehow even louder than the buckling springs found in the IBM Model M. There are even different varieties of MX-style switch the ones with red stems are almost linear in their feedback, while browns, clears, and blues have a little bit of resistance in the middle of the key’s travel. These switches use actual springs and bits of brass to close a switch and they provide tactile feedback to the typist. On the other end of the spectrum is a mechanical keyswitch, best represented by the Cherry MX switch a make and model of switch, with clones also built by Gateron and Kailh. The key doesn’t activate until it hits bottom, and the lifetime of each of these switches is measured in the tens of thousands of cycles instead of the millions of cycles a mechanical keyswitch can handle. It’s certainly an inexpensive way to build a keyboard, but compared to a true mechanical switch it feels like crap. The keys get their springiness from these rubber domes, and when a key is pressed it smashes into the PCB contacts, closing a circuit. This is a specific type of switch, made with two contacts on a PCB, a sheet of rubber with a bunch of little bubbles in it, and a conductive foam pad mounted to the bottom of a key. Ninety-nine percent of the keyboards you’ll ever see are crappy rubber dome keyboards. The only spring pressure comes from a sheet of rubber It’s the Dark Matter keyboard, a custom, split, ergonomic, staggered-columnar, RGB backlit mechanical keyboard, and at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference, he told everyone how and why he made it.Ī rubber dome keyboard. Inspired by these beautiful tools of wordcraft, set out to build his own mechanical keyboard and came up with something amazing. At the 2017 Hackaday Superconference, he quite literally lugged out a Compaq with its beautiful brominated keycaps, and brought out the IBM Model M buckling spring keyboard. While the majority of the population is content with whatever keyboard came with their computer or is supplied by their employer - usually the bottom basement squishy membrane keyboards - there are a small group of keyboard enthusiasts diving into custom keycaps, switch mods, diode matrices, and full-blown ground-up creations.Īriane Nazemi is one of these mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. There is an entire subculture of people fascinated by computer keyboards.