project-image

The Keyboardio Atreus

Created by Keyboardio

An ultraportable mechanical keyboard for comfortable typing anywhere

Latest Updates from Our Project:

The Keyboardio Model 100 is now live on Kickstarter
over 2 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 03:54:51 AM

Hello from Oakland!

We're thrilled to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for the Keyboardio Model 100 is now live. The Model 100 is an updated and refined version of the our first keyboard, the now out of production Model 01. It features a new walnut enclosure option, hot-swappable MX-style keyswitches like your Atreus,  along with dozens of other improvements, both visible and invisible throughout the product. The Kickstarter price is just $289.

Back now! Only on Kickstarter.

Backer updates about the Atreus are pretty much at an end, but updates about the Model 100 are just getting started. If you’d like to follow along as we build and ship our next project, the best way to do that is to back the Model 100 campaign. Even a $1 pledge gets our updates delivered to your inbox (and helps convince Kickstarter’s algorithms to pay attention to the Model 100.) 


<3 Jesse + Kaia

Everything's shipped!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 01:02:44 AM

Hello from Oakland!

In this update: Palm rests have shipped; Atreus updates; customizing your keyboard firmware; a neat hack or two; December shipping deadlines and discount; what's next

Palm rests

At the end of November, we shipped out nearly 1000 palm rests, fulfilling almost all preorders. Shipping in November and December always runs a bit slow and this year is even more so. As of today, it looks like about 50% of palm rest shipments have been delivered, with the rest still in transit. If you’re expecting a palm rest and haven’t received tracking information from us yet, please drop us a line at [email protected].

So far, reports from customers have been very positive, with just a few workmanship issues reported. Even so, we want to make sure we're able to replace any defective or MIA palm rests quickly, so we've held a bunch of units in reserve.

If you haven’t ordered a palm rest yet, they’re now in stock and ready to ship on our website.

The Atreus

Just before American Thanksgiving, our factory delivered the second mass-production run of the Atreus. This time around, we're offering a somewhat wider range of keyswitches. We have keyboards with BOX Brown, BOX White, BOX Red, Speed Copper, Speed Silver, Speed Bronze, and Pro Purple switches ready to ship out. As part of our effort to expand switch selection, we're transitioning to primarily offering keyboards with labeled keycaps. Blank keycaps are still, of course, available as an add-on.

Atreus customer reports from the field have generally been very positive. Overall, we’re quite pleased with the build quality. We’re always looking to improve, however, and have included details here in case you’re interested.

There are just two issues we've run into that require any significant corrective action.

We've seen a handful of keyboards from the first production run with a soldering problem that resulted in keys in two columns being bridged together. We've ended up replacing these keyboards under warranty. The factory tracked this down to a short circuit underneath the ATMega32U4 chip that controls the keyboard. Going forward, the circuit board assembly supplier will be paying additional attention to this failure mode and the keyboard factory has revised their Atreus testing software to explicitly test for this problem during quality control.

The other issue we've run into is that a small number of BOX Brown switches shipped in Atreuses are extra-sensitive. This manifests as the keys acting like they've been pressed when they've just barely been touched. The immediate fix is easy: Since the Atreus uses hot-swap sockets, you can change out switches at home without soldering. We've been sending care packages including replacement keyswitches and key pullers to customers who've run into this issue.

The long-term fix is a bit more involved. Talking to other keyboard manufacturers, this failure with BOX switches isn’t entirely new. One manufacturer has been hand-screening all their keyboards for this defect for a few years now. Our factory has updated their QC procedures to test for the issue, but we really wanted to get to the bottom of things, so we asked the switch manufacturer what went wrong and how we can make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Once we'd identified the problem, our factory delivered a keyboard with a defective switch to Kaihua, who makes the switches we use. A few days later, Kaihua sent us an official investigative report, including the corrective actions they will implement going forward. They’ve made a change to the design tolerances for BOX Brown (and similar switches) and have updated their internal testing regimen. While we never like to ship anything less than perfect to you, we’re very satisfied with Kaihua’s handling of the issue.

If you think your BOX Brown Atreus has a bad switch, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].

Our factory confirmed with Kaihua that it was ok to publish their corrective action report for this issue. We then had it translated into English. Out of respect for privacy, we have blacked out the names of the Kaihua staff involved.

Firmware and Configuration tool

Keyboards are personal tools, and no one layout is perfect for everyone. One of our favorite things about the keyboards we make is that you can customize their layout to work the way you do.

We’ve written up tutorials on two of the most common tweaks folks ask us about:

  •  One-shot modifiers: if you'd like to tap Shift (or Ctrl, or Alt, or...) to enable it, rather than holding it down
  •  Enabling Caps Lock: while we’re not big fans of Caps Lock and so haven't dedicated a key to it by default, we recognize that some folks find it useful. Here's how to add one to your Atreus 

If there’s something you’d like your Atreus to be able to do, but aren’t sure how to enable it, drop us a line via email or chat about it in our Discord.

Chrysalis

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the software side of things, you’ve likely noticed that we haven’t shipped a new stable release of Chrysalis, our graphical configuration tool, since July. We’re a bit behind where we want to be on that front, but we’re hard at work.

Since the last release, we’ve made it much easier to save and share full keyboard layout configurations, rather than just individual layers. The big feature that we’ve been grinding through for the last few months is full support for non-US keyboard layouts, coupled with a brand new key selector.

A preview of Chrysalis set to a German layout

These changes aren’t quite ready for release, but if you’d like to try to the current development version, you can find it at https://github.com/keyboardio/Chrysalis/pull/591

Kaleidoscope

The biggest recent change to Kaleidoscope, the firmware that powers your keyboard is something you’ll likely never see unless you’re a developer. Thanks to the heroic work of @noseglasses, @algernon, Craig Disselkoen, Eric Paniagua, Michael Richters, (and likely other folks we’ve forgotten to name) we now (finally) have a test and simulator framework for Kaleidoscope capable of compiling Kaleidoscope and verifying its functionality without ever having to connect a keyboard or press a single key.

While you can write complex tests that verify functionality deep inside Kaleidoscope using C++ and the Google Test framework, you can test most behavior with simple ‘ktest’ scripts like the one in the screenshot above. You can find a full example tests at https://github.com/keyboardio/Kaleidoscope/tree/master/tests/examples/basic-keypress

If you want to try to run the tests yourself, you can ‘make simulator-tests’ or ‘make docker-simulator-tests’ inside a Kaleidoscope checkout.

The other big recent change to Kaleidoscope is a complete retooling of our command line build system. We’ve replaced the ‘kaleidoscope-builder’ command line tool with a cleaner, simpler set of Makefiles which use Arduino’s new arduino-cli tool. These changes make the build system cleaner, easier to work with, and more maintainable. One particular advantage of switching to arduino-cli is that you’re no longer restricted to checking out the Kaleidoscope source code into a single specific directory. You can now check out the source code wherever you want and point your sketch at it by setting an environment variable or adding a single line to your Makefile.

Hardware hacking

Not that we want you to void your warranty, but we also don’t want you to not void your warranty. discordia took this to heart and added a trackpoint and LED layer indicator to an Atreus.

What’s more, discordia took the time to write a full HOWTO and to publish it to hackaday. Check it out!


This next hack doesn't void your warranty, but we love it too. Alex Young / @regularfry uses his Atreus with a Thinkpad, and designed and 3D-printed risers so that you can put the keyboard over the laptop keys without pressing them down. He's released the design under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, so you're welcome to remix it and print your own to fit your laptop.

Holiday shipping

With international shipping majorly slowed down due to COVID, it’s a bit dicey as to whether we can deliver newly placed orders before Christmas. If you’re shipping to the U.S. or Canada, UPS Worldwide Express (the expensive option) will probably get there in time if you order this week, weather permitting. No carriers are willing to guarantee Christmas delivery.

We also offer gift cards, good for any item in our store. They arrive instantly by email and never expire. You can buy them at our website.

If you’d like to get another keyboard for yourself or someone else, the discount code GOODBYE2020 will save you $20.20 off an Atreus, but only until December 31.

What’s next

In addition to the software improvements discussed above, we’re hard at work on the Model 100, our followup to the Model 01. While we don’t have anything specific to announce right now, we’re working toward a Kickstarter in early 2021.

To improve key feel, we’ve moved some key stem positions for the Model 100. In this picture, we’re testing out the prototype the factory sent over.

<3 Jesse + Kaia

Shipped!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Oct 01, 2020 at 07:24:17 PM

TL;DR: If you backed for an Atreus on Kickstarter and have received neither a shipping notification nor an email about your order, please email us at [email protected] or message us on Kickstarter.


Hello from Oakland!

Keyboards have started to arrive!

September’s been a pretty busy month for us. We spent the first couple weeks working with the factory to wrap up mass production and quality control inspections of the Atreus. Keyboards finally arrived at our fulfillment warehouse in Hong Kong late in the day on Saturday, September 19.

The warehouse started packing up your keyboards and travel cases the following Monday. Over the course of 5 days, they packed up and shipped out over 2500 Atreus preorders.

As of today, we’ve shipped keyboards and travel cases to all Kickstarter backers, with the exception of a handful of folks in South Korea and Taiwan who need to provide us with customs information, 18 backers who still haven’t filled in their BackerKit survey, 3 BackerKit backers whose credit cards were declined, four customers who asked us to hold their orders, and all 100-odd backers in Canada.

We believe we’ve been in touch with every Kickstarter backer within the past 10 days, either to send a tracking number or to discuss logistics. If you haven’t heard from us, that means something’s gone wrong and that you should either contact us at [email protected] or send us a message on Kickstarter.

Customs, Tax and Duty

As we mentioned during the campaign, you’re responsible for tax, duty, and import fees owed on your keyboards and accessories. However, if you need any additional documentation about your order to help appease local customs inspectors, please email us at [email protected].  Additionally, in previous campaigns we’ve had the occasional report from customers about certain carriers charging predatory handling fees. We don’t like using couriers that treat you badly. While we probably can’t get them to cut you a break, if your shipping experience is bad, please email us to let us know, so that we can avoid them in the future.

Canadian Orders

Due to a confluence of circumstances, all of the “reasonable” shipping options from Hong Kong to Canada are currently unavailable to us. Consequently, we’ve made the decision to ship Canadian orders by way of a pit stop in the USA. We’ve begun moving inventory to fill those orders over from Hong Kong and the first batch of Canadian orders should ship out from California tomorrow.

US Orders

With very limited exceptions, all US-destined keyboards for Kickstarter backers arrived in Chicago by air freight direct from Hong Kong late on Sunday night. For complicated and slightly frustrating reasons, the USPS labels for shipments headed to the US had to be generated before packages left Hong Kong. Those  labels were all generated by our shipping partner’s US contractor in Smyrna, TN on September 22nd.  If you check your order on USPS.com, you’ll see tracking information that says "Your item was picked up by a shipping partner at 3:06 am on September 22, 2020 in SMYRNA, TN 37167. This does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date.”  That is…partially true. It does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date.

To the best of our knowledge, US-destined orders cleared customs on Monday and were handed over to our shipping partner’s US contractor on Tuesday. We’ve been told to expect that you should start to see USPS tracking information for your shipments tomorrow, but have also been told that the exact date is not guaranteed.

German Orders

All Kickstarter orders destined for Germany went out by Hong Kong Post. It appears that they all arrived in Germany on Monday or Tuesday. The tracking information Hong Kong Post provides for those shipments says, somewhat alarmingly, that each is “HELD BY CUSTOMS.” That appears to be a mistranslation. Pulling up tracking numbers on https://www.deutschepost.de/, the same shipments show a much less terrifying update saying “Preliminary customs inspection for goods originating outside the EU.”  Over the course of the day today, we’ve started to see tracking updates that say “Delivered” for some of those shipments.

Palm rests

In our last update, we told you that palm rests weren’t going to be ready in time to ship them with your keyboards and travel cases. We currently believe that the final “golden sample” should be ready for approval in about a week. After that, the factory will start mass production. When the palm rests are ready, we’ll be in touch to verify your current shipping addresses before sending out your palm rests. While you’ll still be responsible for tax, duty, and import fees, we’ll be covering any additional shipping charges.

<3 Jesse + Kaia

Shipping update
over 3 years ago – Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 12:25:36 AM

TL;DR: keycap production is in progress, but a little behind schedule. Keyboards probably won't ship before early September

Hello from Oakland,

Today's update is just a quick note about when we expect to ship your keyboards.

Keycaps

When we last wrote, we told you that we were waiting on samples of keycaps for approval. Those keycaps did arrive earlier this month. They looked good.  We approved them.

The Atreus' keycaps are made out of bright white PBT, which is dye-sublimated black and then laser-ablated to reveal bright white legends. These caps are a little bit more expensive than what we'd originally planned on, but we really like how they've come out and are happy to be able to put them under your fingers soon.

Keyboard shipping schedule

Earlier this week, the factory gave us a heads up that they were running about five days behind schedule, mostly driven by keycap injection molding.

As of Monday, the factory has been injection-molding about 20,000 keycaps a day and overnighting them to the dye sublimation workshop, where they are dyed over the course of 24 hours and then overnighted back to the factory for installation and laser-engraving.

In theory, that should mean that we should expect keyboards to be ready for inspection on August 29, plus or minus a few days. As soon as they're ready, our QC agent will head to the factory to check them over. From there, they'll be loaded onto a truck to our warehouse in Hong Kong. That usually takes about a day. Once the keyboards arrive in Hong Kong, workers at the warehouse will start packing and labeling orders. With a few thousand orders to get out the door, it may take a couple days before everything is ready to go out.

At this point, we believe that keyboards will end up shipping in early September, which is a bit later than the August ship date we'd promised. We're really sorry about the delay and working hard to get high-quality keyboards to you as quickly as we can.

Palm rests

The last palm rest sample from the wood supplier had a little bit too much of a gap around the edges of the keyboard, so they're updating the design just a bit. Right now, we're expecting the next sample to be ready for review early next week. We will, of course, share updates as we have them.

More keycaps

We can't make any promises on this front, but we're starting to look at making additional keycap sets in the same style as the Atreus keycaps. (This would be a standalone product, not included with the Atreus). We'd love to know what other legends you might want. You can let us know via this Google Form: https://forms.gle/GJs2uq2kdbGVjHqH9

<3 Jesse + Kaia

Almost there!
over 3 years ago – Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 01:24:26 PM

Hello from Oakland,

First up, we wanted to give you an update on our shipping schedule. As of today, we believe that keyboards and travel cases are going to ship out in August as originally promised, although there's a chance they'll slip to early September. Walnut palm rests will ship shortly after keyboards and travel cases.

The current global shipping climate has been fairly unpredictable but we're generally seeing delivery times improve. We're expecting that most keyboards will arrive on your doorsteps in September.

If the shipping address you gave us on BackerKit isn't where you'll be in September, you should update it. You're welcome to do that yourself on BackerKit, by messaging us here on Kickstarter, or by emailing us at [email protected].

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of our progress, read on.

The Atreus

The keyboards are almost ready to go. So far we’ve assembled all the circuit boards, screwed all the plastic trays to the aluminum key plates, and installed all the switches.

The factory told us that after first-round electrical testing, they found only a single defective circuit board. (There was a solder bridge between two of the pins on the microcontroller, which is a pretty easy thing to fix up.) In theory, this is something the PCB assembly shop ought to have caught, but we’re happy that the factory did that extra round of QC and reported the issue to us.

They've fully assembled all of the keyboards with blank / un-legended keycaps.

Keyboards that will ship with labeled keycaps just need their keycaps, then they'll be ready to go.

The Keycaps

Recap

In our last update, we told you that the factory had run into a snag with labeling the black PBT keycaps. Initially, the factory thought that they'd be able to source PBT plastic doped with additives that resulted in bright white legends when laser marked. That turned out not to be the case.

After trying out eight different PBT variants, they managed to laser-mark bright golden white legends on the black PBT. Testing in their in-house lab showed a little bit of fading, but nothing we wouldn't accept. So that's what we used for the pilot run keyboards.

The problem was that after a week of typing, some folks started to notice key legends fading to a color that can most charitably be described as "off-black" 

Laser-marked PBT keycaps showing evidence of fading

The factory went back to the drawing board and proposed two possible alternatives.

Option A: Dye sublimation, take 1

The first keycap labeling technique the factory proposed is straight from the Queen of Heart's playbook in Alice in Wonderland, although considerably higher tech. Instead of injection-molding black keycaps and putting white labels on them, the factory would injection-mold white PBT keycaps, dye them black and then laser ablate the keycap to expose bright white PBT. The process is a good deal more expensive than "regular" laser engraving or silkscreening, but is reported to be worth it.

The dyeing process is called "sublimation" and results in the color working itself into the plastic, not just coating the surface.

Sadly, the factory told us that they couldn't find a single workshop in the entire Pearl River Delta that could do the bulk dye sublimation for us, so that was a bust.

Option B: Silk-screen

The next choice was silk-screen printing, which they believed would result in cleaner, more reliable results than pad printing.

The factory first tried to have an outsourced vendor silkscreen the legends onto the keyboard. This vendor thought it would be most efficient to do the silkscreening after the keys were mounted on the keyboard. The results were terrible.

The first attempted at silk screened legends was mostly an example of what not to do. Bad alignment, ink smudges, warped letters...

After that, the factory brought the process in-house, designed some custom silkscreening jigs, and moved the legends to the centers of the keys.

The custom jig helped improve silkscreen quality

After a bit of experimentation, they managed to get nice looking results, so they sent them off to their test lab to make sure they'd be durable enough.

They were not durable enough.

After a bit of research, the factory got back to us and explained that silkscreening on PBT just doesn't work because the plastic isn't porous and doesn't bond to the paint without special pretreatment.

Pretreatment didn't sound so bad. So we asked what was involved in that. "It's kind of like fire, but it's not fire and we'd need to find a special factory." We can't blame the factory for not knowing the English phrase "Corona Discharge Etching," since we hadn't heard of it either. 

Helpfully, the factory shared this Douyin (The Chinese version of TikTok) video with us to explain Corona Discharge Etching.

The factory wasn’t enthused about trying to find a partner who could handle this process. We started trying to figure out what to do if our plans fell through.

Dye-sublimation, take 2

On July 16, the factory popped up with some good news. Our salesperson had been in touch with an old friend who works for a dye sublimation workshop that could take on a job of our size. There was just one wrinkle. That workshop is in Qingdao, a city about 2000km from Dongguan where the keycaps are being injection molded and laser engraved.

For the last two weeks, packages of samples have been flying back and forth between Dongguan and Qingdao.

The quality of the dye-job on very first samples was pretty promising, but the "white" color of the internal plastic wasn't right, so the factory injection-molded two different sets of white keycaps with slightly different tints. 

The first samples that came out of the dye-and-laser process had a bit too much of a blue tint; we ended up choosing a whiter shade of base plastic

Since we've never worked with dyed keycaps before, we want to do everything we can to make sure the dye won't stain your fingers or fade. At our request, the factory tested the caps with abrasives, alcohol, and even boiled them. Nothing they did appeared to cause trouble with the dye.

“Hot keycap soup” helped test dye permanence

Still cautious, we contracted with a test lab to cook a few sample keycaps with their high-powered UV test chamber for a day, testing before and after with a colorimeter. The keycaps passed with flying colors. Er. The keycaps passed with only an imperceptible change to their colors.

At the same time, we found that the font weights we'd originally chosen for laser marking were too thick, resulting in some loss of detail with the new process.

Our original type choice was too heavy

The factory had us send over a matrix of different font sizes and weights for them to try.

Testing different font weights

Last night, those samples arrived back in Dongguan and got sent over to the laser-engraving vendor. Today's photos from the factory look very, very promising, but we haven't yet touched any of the dyed keycaps. The factory intends to DHL samples to us tonight. Once we see them, we'll either be able to approve them or we'll go back to the drawing board.

Keycap samples en route

If we approve the dyed keycaps, the factory believes that it'll be about 3 weeks from the day we say "go" to the day the keycaps are ready for final inspection and shipment to our Hong Kong warehouse.

The Travel Case

The Atreus travel cases are sewn and ready to go! After the supplier finished them up, our third-party QC agent spent half a day checking them over before signing off on the production run.

The factory checking over each case for proper construction and clipping loose threads. This is the final step before boxing and our independent inspection

As of about two weeks ago, the travel cases are all sitting in the travel case factory's warehouse waiting to head to Hong Kong along with the keyboards.

The Palm Rest

At the start of the Kickstarter campaign, we said that we thought that the palm rests were the items mostly likely to ship late. Unfortunately, it looks like we were right. As of today, we don't believe that the palm rests will ship at the same time as the keyboards and travel cases.

Right now, we expect to ship your palm rests sometime after everything else, hopefully just a few weeks later. If you need us to combine your shipments, message us on Kickstarter and we'll hold your keyboard and other accessories until your palm rest is ready.

Signing off on a final palm rest design has been going slower than we expected. The main driver for the delay has been that the factory is very, very busy since reopening. Couple that with slower-than-normal international shipping and each change has taken about three weeks.

The first "maybe final" sample we were sent warped and shrank slightly in transit. This meant that it didn't sit flat on a desk and that once an Atreus got installed, it was basically impossible to remove. As a result, the factory has moved to a harder type of walnut that they typically use for making flooring. They are paying extra attention to the pre-milling wood curing process and the post-milling finishing process. At the same time, they're making the Atreus' nook in the palm rest just a bit roomier to help make sure your keyboard never gets stuck.

We believe this updated sample will be finished next week and will likely be in Oakland the following week for approval. If it passes muster, we'll ask the factory to kick off production.

<3  Jesse + Kaia