Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
If you won't wait for a solution, please put the planck kit on ebay - I am sure you get there at least the money you have paid. If you have red or blue mx switches, I will even bet myself. I have just as little as 5 plancks, can't get enough of them... ;)
I'm frankly tired of the insults (eg "bring your kid to work day" comparisons) about the quality - I know it's not what you were expecting, and we will take care of every customer that's unhappy/wants a replacement (MD and I will work together on this), but this was out of my control, and I don't appreciate these types of comments - they don't help OLKB grow, me improve the quality, or address any of the real issues.
I'm obviously unhappy about the results too - I don't want to send out poorly cut plates or mis-colored bottoms.
My shop shipped directly to Massdrop this round because of the quantity (1500 orders, 3000+ parts), so obviously I couldn't keep an eye over every part - something I've been able to do in the past (which led to the 6 month wait time for the first drop, and long wait times for the store).
I've ordered this plate cut-out before, and it's been fine - my only guess is that the size of the order/time it was needed by caused them to sacrifice quality/tolerances. I'll be discussing all of this with my shop in the coming weeks once Massdrop is able to collect the images of the problems.
Concerning the milled bottoms - there's always been little marks and imperfections. The anodizer we work with is pretty terrible from what I've experienced, and that's something I'd like to change going forward. As a whole, this round's still looks better than previous ones.
What you can do to help OLKB become better:
* Take pictures and send them to Massdrop's customer support - I'll be able to show my shop all of these, and what exactly will need to be changed going forward. * Please don't email me, private message me, or jump in the question thread about this - I get enough emails from people that won't see this, and it's an insane amount of stress to put the right amount of effort into responses in a timely fashion. I'd like to express my concern for the part quality to everyone, but I simply don't have time to. * Please don't give me advice/tell me what you think - I've had a pretty solid idea of how to fix things since the first reports of problems, and if anything, I'll be consulting people I trust about this. * Please don't speculate about what went wrong, who messed up, or how the the parts are made - I've explained everything I could think of in my last post, but if you have any questions about that, feel free to ask - please consider waiting until this stuff dies down a bit, though.