System76 has been selling Linux laptop and desktop computers since 2005, but up until recently most of the company’s computers were designed and manufactured by other companies and customized with small tweaks and Linux software by System76.
A few years ago the company started manufacturing some of its own desktops, and notebooks may eventually follow. But the next product from System76 that was designed in-house and which will be manufactured in the US, is a keyboard – the System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard.
Made from two solid blocks of milled aluminum, the keyboard is designed to be customizable thanks to support for swappable switches and keycaps and support for remapping or even using extra keys.
There’s no word on the price or release date yet, but the company has begun manufacturing and more details should be available soon.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard [System76/GitHub]
Linux PC maker System76 is now making its own keyboard, and the design is open source. The System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard design and firmware details are available at GitHub and it’s designed to be customized with swappable keycaps and switches. - Custom Watch Faces for Watchy [Crowd Supply]
Watchy is designed to be a hackable, open hardware smartwatch with an electronic paper display. It’s being crowdfunded as we speak, and the developers are sharing progress including watch enclosure prototypes and some new watch faces. - Bullitt Group Announces New Mobile Partnership with Motorola [Bullitt]
The company that makes rugged smartphones under the CAT brand (and used to make Kodak-branded phones) is now licensing the Motorola brand name for a new line of rugged phones that will be Motorola in name only. - Sxmo 1.3.0 brings usability, performance improvements to this simple, geeky Linux phone UI [LinuxSmartphones]
Most of the GNU/Linux distributions designed to run on the PinePhone feature touch-friendly user interfaces that more closely resemble Android or iOS than a desktop operating system. Phosh, KDE Plasma Mobile, and Lomiri are popular options. And then there’s Sxmo. This simple user interface and suite of apps is lightweight and speedy, but it’s not exactly intuitive. You have to memorize a series of touch gestures and/or single, double, or triple-tap functions that use the power and volume buttons to get the most out of it. But Sxmo is probably the fastest software I’ve tried on the PinePhone to date, and it received a significant update this week.Â
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Two milled blocks of aluminum? I wouldn’t be surprised if that keyboard cost $300-400.
Anyway, if you want total customization, like 96%, grid arrangements, or extra rows and columns, what you do is:
Manually place the keys where you want on this website.
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/
Paste the output into here to generate a plate to stick your key switches in and a case to put them into. http://builder.swillkb.com/
You can then modify the output files in a CAD program to optimize the shape further, for the sake of whatever QMK microcontroller you’re going to use.
Then take your keyboard layout and put it in this site, which will tell you how to wire your switches together and give you a version of QMK firmware specifically for your layout.
https://kbfirmware.com/
Then you just have to buy all that stuff (ideally in bulk for a few people so you can get it cheaper per unit) and put it together…and hope all that stuff you read about making your hands hurt less was right.
Wow months late and way more expensive than it should be. I know the European prices include tax, but this is ridiculous given the US price.
this is better keyboard https://klawiatura.wordpress.com/wersja-mini/
‘+’ without shift, nationality char etc.