
Interview with Jesse Vincent, Co-Founder and CTO of Keyboardio - charlieegan3
http://blog.hwtrek.com/?p=4948
======
FreezerburnV
I've actually had the pleasure of using one of the Model 01s. (a version that
is, from what I understand, slightly different from what is going to be
shipping) During their Kickstarter they actually went on a huge tour to visit
something like 30 different hacker spaces in the 30 days of their Kickstarter
to meet the people who did, or might want to, back their project. I think the
best endorsement of it I can give is this: I was actually sad when I went home
and couldn't take it with me. I backed their Kickstarter, and had been paying
attention to their blog for a while, so I'm quite looking forward to when mine
finally arrives.

What's very surprising to me is that I don't feel like I've seen much of this
keyboard mentioned on HN, considering it really is the ultimate hacker's
keyboard. (the most discussion I saw was 14 posts on their Kickstarter
announcement from a quick search) Everything about it is going to be open
source: from the actual specs of the hardware inside (so you could manufacture
your own!) to all the code being used to run the keyboard. It's completely
modifiable from the top to bottom. I don't know if it will have the capability
when it finally ships, as Jesse mentioned it wasn't in their firmware to be
able to do so at the meetup, but one of the ideas that excites me is the
ability to change the state of the colored keys. Someone at the meetup I went
to brought up the idea of changing the color of all the keys to a bright red
when plugged into a production computer and were using a root terminal. It was
mentioned that they were interested in adding that capability, but who knows,
if they don't, someone else might put in a pull request for it.

~~~
jacobolus
Most of the discussions here were about earlier prototypes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893457)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895746)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891893)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9719773)

~~~
FreezerburnV
Guess I missed those in my search. I just did a search for "keyboardio" and
looked at the first page or so, my apologies for not being more thorough.

------
hamsternipples
I use the workman layout, so I'll obviously want to move the keys around to
match the layout. some keyboards keys break when trying to shuffle them
around. does anyone know if it's easy to move the keys around?

still gonna buy one anyway, and if I can't I'll just put stickers on top like
my mpb :)

~~~
zck
As Jesse mentioned, you can't do this. The reason is because each key is
formed differently. For example, look at the N key here: [https://ksr-
ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/972/304/567c71457a35a77...](https://ksr-
ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/972/304/567c71457a35a77026b4f5acae974858_original.JPG?v=1434133466&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=91152fc5e8520ee062435ae1f87f919f)
.

See how the bottom edge is not flat, but diagonal? You couldn't move that key
anywhere else. There might be some keys you can move (for example, Y and U
look the same size), but arbitrary swapping isn't going to work.

~~~
hamsternipples
yeah I totally didn't notice. I'm gonna just order the dot labels and put
stickers on top. that's really cool the keys are custom like that.

------
dakotasmith
Seems down at the moment. Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oivr__r...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oivr__rPGAsJ:blog.hwtrek.com/%3Fp%3D4948+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

