wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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514

Joined

2 yr. ago

Well it’s certainly better looking than the Rivian, which is one of the ugliest production vehicles I’ve ever seen.

REY DAX has no time for this nonsense.
https://i.ibb.co/FK1MgrQ/reydax.png

I have an E-Yooso Z-19, which has a literally identical layout. The E-Yooso is a simple steel plate with a minimal plastic case. I barely had room for a tape mod (and then I went with green switches, so there wasn't much point anyway). I do suspect the PCBs are from the same factory. Key layout, indicator LED placement, USB-C port placement, all are exactly the same. EDIT: I downloaded the RedDragon Pro software, and whaddaya know! It recognized my E-Yooso as a Kitava Lite K636. I have remapped PrtSc to Delete and fixed one of the three issues I had with this layout. :-)

The E-Yooso is pretty nice to use, for what it is, which is a low end commodity board. Outemu hotswap compatible, meaning only Outemu and a few other narrow-pin 3-pin switches work, but selection in that space is better than it used to be. Looking at the US Amazon page, the Reddragon is likely the same. You will NOT get a high end sound, but the low case should mean it's not too terribly hollow, which IMHO helps a lot in this price range. For instance, I also have a "Sky 98" low-end 1800, and it just looks and feels a lot cheaper (more so before I spent WAY too much time messing with it and glueing stuff inside it) because it's got so much more plastic and so much more room inside. A steel plate is not trendy of course, but it is solid and weighty, which is nicer than cheap plastic. Mine has been reliable, and given price-point expectations it was not disappointing in terms of build, typing experience, etc. Reddragon is in that same category, probably a bit better regarded, in fact, though individual models can vary quite a lot in this price range. The biggest unique thing to consider with this board is the layout.

This 94 key layout is interesting. It's probably the most usable of all the attempts to cram a full numpad into the exact space of a compact TKL. Moving plus and minus to the top row isn't too bad, and while it's on the "wrong" side, the Enter key is close enough to hit without moving your hand much. There will be muscle memory to retrain if you do touch ten-key data entry, but overall it's usable. Unfortunately, the whole design philosophy also means you only save "1u" versus a 96% and maybe 1.5u-2.5u versus an 1800 (depends on the exact model). It's hard to say if it's worth it, but if you like Numpads, this one is weird but not bad.

Surprisingly, the bigger issue I ran into is that I really wanted Delete and the Nav keys to be more accessible without turning off numlock and more intuitive regardless, and the E-Yooso was not re-mappable (EDIT: See above. It has some basic remapping now, via the Kitava's software). I'm not expecting QMK/VIA on a board in this space, but an app that could "flash" remapping would have been the one thing that would have kept it on my desk longer. I had a pretty nice AutoHotkey script that switched PrintScreen out for Delete and set Shift+Numpad Add and Subtract to Page Up and Page Down. It actually worked really well, but it's Windows only and and I can't install it on my work PC.

I got the E-Yooso for under USD25. At that price, I think it's a good deal, though there are still the limitations. People in the hobby forget that even 10-20 dollars/pounds/Euros can feel like a lot when the whole endeavor is kind of a luxury anyway, but ultimately I'd probably recommend you "pick a side" and find a TKL or a 96%/1800 layout in roughly the same price range.

Nicely done. I hope I can get something to come out that well.

In the low-end space where I play, and I think well into the mid-range, the engraver/cutter is on a 2d gantry, basically a Core-XY 3D printer with no Z axis. I focus manually with thumbscrews and a shim. 3-axis and even 5-axis lasers exist, but I think most of them are industrial class.

You think that's not WORK? 🤣

Oh, and for any crossover fans, the fountain pen was a a Lamy Safari with a Chinese 1.5mm stub nib and Herbin Perle Noir ink. My wife literally asked me the other day, "why aren't you into typewriters? You like every other weird old way to write stuff down."

Was definitely planning for a jig, though I hadn't got as far as planning for something to do multiple keys, and yeah, switches would be the obvious choice for mounting securely. Some sort of quick-n-dirty fabricated plate would give the type of predictable spacing that could work. Gotta get that initial placement just right, though. :-)

Obviously our engravers are pretty different models, but what sort of settings are you using, and what sort of shades are you able to pull from the dry-erase? I notice that the "cardinal" and green I was able to get were not a world apart from the old Cherry 9009 keyboards that inspired the GMK set. I also wonder if the chemical composition of Cricut's "infusible ink," at least the dye, is much different than dry-erase.

LOL, this is the sort of stupid thing that happens when you have ideas for nonstandard layouts but you don't type well enough to trust yourself with blank keycaps.

You're right. The main challenge was just zeroing in on the point where the plastic softens to let the heated ink penetrate without deforming or burning the keycap. I think there's potential here to do it better than I have, but I do think I landed on one of 2 or 3 different possible settings that will work decently well.

It's a low-rent form of dye-sublimation, and I don't know if they're using lasers, but dye-sub is one of the preferred ways to add legends to PBT keycaps.

So this is a variation on dye sublimation, one of the main ways legends are printed onto single-color keycaps. The process is basically your second idea and exactly as @UraniumGreen says.

• Coat the area in ink from a marker meant for permanently decorating cloth or various polyesterish plastics. The intended heat source is a glorified clothes iron made for DIY crafting.
• Feed the Laser a simple bitmap image and run it low and slow, so it heats up the plastic but doesn't melt or char it like on several of the earlier trials in that photo.

This should cause the heat-activated ink to integrate more or less permanently to the polyester-based PBT plastic. Then I clean off the unlasered ink with isopropyl alcohol and/or acetone. The zapped ink doesn't fade at all, though as you can see it's not super vibrant.

The sweet spot to do this without charring or melting the keycap is pretty small, though though there's probably another configuration where you use higher power and quicker movement. There might also be one at even lower power and longer time. I'd seen several people try it, but with weird projects on cheap lasers you've typically got to find your own settings. Also, don't laser ABS; very bad idea.

Neutral Zone Line. I'm not really into Robro Space Country though. More of an Alt-Space-Country/Federana guy.

5W diode laser and Cricut brand infusible ink. I don't know how deep it penetrates, but 2% @ 45mm/s puts down a muted but easily readable legend on PBT that doesn't come off with 91% IPA or 100% acetone nail polish remover.

In your price range, I know of three Southpaw options:

• Epomaker GK96LS. Wireless, Fn layer media keys on the function row. Cons are the "60% style" arrow keys hiding under RShift and the modifiers, and it's not QMK, though they say it is programmable.
• Keychron Q12. QMK, knob, sensible arrows, three extra keys, plus the usual Fn media key mapping. Would probably be perfect for your criteria if it were wireless.
• Keychron Q14 Pro. If you like the idea of an "Alice" quasi-ergo layout, this actually checks all your boxes.

My kid is ten. I don't like most of them, but the ones I hate are the one who punctuate their prosaic Minecraft and Roblox adventures with blood-curdling screams.

To be clear, what’s under discussion is free shipping on returns. And fine, whatever. It will be annoying, but if the price of returning in the same packaging is known at purchase time, I’ll survive and adjust my shopping with that vendor as necessary.

Work (i.e. "the left side of my desk"): the cheapest hotswap 1800 layout I could find on Amazon Warehouse deals (Magegee Sky98 I think), with EVA foam and some random metal weights glued inside the case bottom, tape mod, red outemu changed out for green, and some low-profile XVX keycaps I won on a reddit giveaway a while ago.

Home (right side of the desk): The DIY handwire TKL-like that I posted the other day, with aluminum and oak sandwich case, Box Navies, and "VSA" keycaps with DSA F-row.

Yes, though 90Hz is fine for general computing and non-enthusiast gaming. It also seems like some Keychrons may need to be configured in QMK to use the full 1000Hz in wired mode.

Seems like QMK can handle use over Bluetooth at 90 hertz polling, and configuration only while plugged in. None of the QMK Keychron boards seem to include a 2.4GHz dongle polling at the same 1000hz as the wired connection.

I left it absolutely invigorated and optimistic for the franchise. I saw it had some flaws, with one sizeable one being that it should have ignored the cliffhanger in TFA and caught up 6-12 months later; the OT (and less successfully, the PT) got to handwave a LOT of character development by simply letting life happen offscreen. Still, TLJ took a needlessly derivative setup from TFA and set the stage for a much more interesting Episode Nine than we got, and I utterly disagree that he didn't get or like Star Wars. Shit, Rian Johnson is the only one who was willing to SAY the words "Darth Sidious."

I thought he gave a thoughtful fan's perspective on what Star Wars needs to be to remain relevant, the theme of growing from failure being particularly well done for a big popcorn franchise. The scene with Rose's sister, the Yoda scene, the acting from Adam Driver after the throne room scene? All peak Star Wars IMHO. Then of course TROS came along and was so clumsy and petty in how it blew up Rian Johnson's new directions, and so generally messy, that it didn't even please the people who hated TLJ.

TFA was useful as a palate cleanser for the generation who rejected the PT, and it gave us a compelling new batch of heroes and villains (Snoke honestly being the least interesting as a character), but it didn't really DO much, and its worldbuilding was absolutely retrograde. TLJ was a needed course correction, but Disney not only recoiled from the backlash, but took all the wrong lessons from it even if it did need to affect the direction of Ep9. JJ was, in the end, very wrong for Star Wars, though if TFA was his only one, it might not have been so obvious.

-Two others being the framing device of the "slow speed chase" and Finn's arc being such a minor step forward . A few tweaks to the technobabble or moving them to Crait earlier and having it be a bit more of a formidable facility could have helped the first one, and having Finn more explicitly trying to save Rey and Poe at the cost of the Resistance might have better highlighted the additional layer of growth RJ was thought he still needed.