400% funded in 11 hours?! Thank you!
about 4 years ago
– Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 08:07:08 AM
Hello from Oakland,
Wow! You folks are amazing. Thank you so, so, so much.
We hit our $25,000 funding goal in seven minutes.
We hit $100,000 and 665 backers in just over 11 hours.
And that's all because of you.
Looks like we really get to make this thing!
Keeping you in the loop
It's our plan to post campaign updates at least every week during the campaign and at least every month after that, until we've delivered all your rewards.
During our first Kickstarter, we hosted meetups at 25+ makerspaces across the US and Canada so you could meet the keyboard in person. As we were starting to plan this campaign, we'd hoped to have at least a "mini" roadshow, with stops in California, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. That is...not going to happen.
We hope to share a bunch of details about the design and production of the Keyboardio Atreus in our campaign updates (as you might expect if you backed the Model 01)
We're also going to try something new. We have a couple ideas for super-fancy backer rewards that may or may not work out. Over the next couple weeks, we're going to try prototyping a one or more of them. Along the way, we'll write up our experiments in backer updates. You can find the first teaser at the end of this update.
A quick correction about materials
When the campaign launched, we accidentally described the keyplate which helps stabilize the keyswitches as being made from the wrong metal. The keyplate is not made from steel but from anodized aluminum.
Aluminum is a tough material that's great for keyplates and is a lot lighter than the equivalent bit of steel.
We're really sorry about the error. We expect that this detail is not likely to be a make-or-break factor for your backing, but we wanted to be sure to communicate about it now, when it's still easy for you to adjust your pledge.
I (Jesse) failed to cross-check our documentation when writing the text for the campaign. We absolutely didn't mean to deceive you. Thanks so much to the backer who wrote us privately to point out the inconsistency that made our error obvious. We've updated the campaign page.
One possible ultra-premium backer reward
Plastic keycaps are very standard. We've chosen PBT, a relatively nice plastic for the Atreus' keycaps. But, if we're going for something decadent to pair with a milled walnut palm rest, milled walnut keycaps are a pretty obvious choice.
We've only just started playing around with options and don't have much to show on this front yet.
We do, however, have a laser cutter, a 3D printer, and a CNC mill at home in Oakland.
And we're literally not going anywhere in the next few weeks.
So far, we've built up a 3D model of a standard keycap shape that we think would work well, CNC-milled the top side of one keycap just to get a feel for it, and 3D printed a few more samples as we were tweaking dimensions.
One of the next things we need to figure out is whether we want to try to mill the parts of the keycaps that mount on the switches or whether we want to use another technique.
The nice thing about milling the keycaps out of solid walnut is that we can make the walls reasonably thick. The downside is that the tolerances on the bit that connects with the keyswitch are pretty tight and the wood would be fairly thin. We worry a lot about it cracking. That said, we've seem some gorgeous examples of the technique.
The other option is to mill keycaps that are just..empty on the bottom side and to mate them to injection-molded keycaps with a good stem and a flat top. In this case, the outer walls of the caps would end up a bit thinner, but we wouldn't have any worries about the stems.
We just happen to have enough of these plastic mini-keycaps sitting around the office to make 5 or 6 sets of keys for the Atreus.
If everything works out, the goal would be to cut the set of keycaps for each super-premium keyboard from a single piece of wood, paying careful attention to the position and continuity of the wood-grain.
We can not emphasize enough that this is an experiment and we don't know if it will work out, how many we'd make, or what we might charge for them.
But we can promise that whether it works out or not, we'll write it up here.
<3 Jesse + Kaia