The next big thing in mechanical keyboards is magnetic switches. Mechanical keyboards quickly went from a niche product to mainstream during the pandemic,
These keyboards rely on magnets and springs and activate by sensing changes in the magnetic field. Popularized by Dutch keyboard startup Wooting, these switches rely on the Hall Effect and have actually been around since the 1960s.
You can change how far you need to press down to register the keystroke, as well as for the release point.
The one thing you can’t change, though, is the switch’s resistance. Despite all the talk of magnets, that’s still handled by the spring inside the switch, after all (for the moment, until the xyz is released).
But interestingly, this also means with temperature differences, you may also have to “calibrate” your keyboard. The price point for the Akko MOD007B PC Santorini keyboard at around US$110 to $150 is certainly not more expensive than many mechanical keyboards.
If you want to go overboard, you can even create something akin to a macro by assigning multiple actions to the same key, so that a single keypress registers a different action when you’ve pressed half-way down, as you bottom out and when the switch pushes the keycap up again — and maybe another one somewhere in-between. I haven’t quite found a personal use case for this yet, but somebody surely will.
From the article. Cool stuff!
I’ll be over here with my 1/64 keyboard.
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From the article. Cool stuff!
I’ll be over here with my 1/64 keyboard.
Article writer must not play games. WASD being able to walk slowly would be dope.
QMK etc do something similar, where holding the key doesn’t keep spamming it, it does a different keystroke, Miryoku is a pretty extreme example.