MAY UPDATE 2021
Hello Ents,
First off, I want to thank everyone all the friends along the way who have seen us grow from the Aegis, to the EXT65, to the Constellation. During this time, we've done many other things like TGR Alice Wrist rests, organising and sponsoring a bunch of Sydney and Melbourne meets, started our own community shop (you're on it!) and move to a little bit of a warehouse, starting our own line of unique switches and collaborating with great designers like Funderburker, Ivery Keyboards, ZTBoards and Biso. We have plenty more up our sleeves this year but first I want to give a big thank you from all the support and purchases. As you may or may not know, we acquired Ryan of Ivery keyboards last year to utilise his skills and bring his board, the alice inspired Praxis, into our family. I'm proud to announce that he is joining the Keyboard Treehouse full time starting in June!
We've seen an immense growth in the hobby, and both myself and Ryan are often coming in and out of the warehouse after our normal work hours to fulfil orders. As we have more in the pipeline and expanding our capacity, we're happy to have a full time staffer to be in the warehouse and also talk to all of you on the Keyboard Treehouse discord. This should mean even faster turnaround for orders, increased capacity for products (eg. the Salvation preorder), and allowing us to design new and interesting things.
We are changing the store a little bit because of this. Keyboard treehouse is a passion project of mine, to help makers in the region to have a store front and make and sell stuff, allowing them do something they love in the hobby. Whilst our current solution is using third party apps, it can be a little confusing on our backend for mix orders from different vendors. In future, we'll act more like a fulfilment center, and have better customer service with Ryan going full time. You'll see a few things change, but we have asked our makers to keep doing what they're doing. We'll have some transitional changes, but we'll be sure to keep you in the loop on the discord.
PRODUCT UPDATES
The SALVATION combines the soft and vibrant typing experience of an innovative leaf spring mounting system with a 60% tray case design. The preorder is closing this month, so be sure you DO NOT miss out on this board. If you're on the fence, check out these great videos to help inform your decision.
- BadSeed Tech review of a BLUE Salvation
- LightningXI with lubed Pewters Typing Sounds with GMK keycaps
- LightningXI with lubed Pewters Typing Sounds with CRP keycaps
- Wilba on Apiary stream highlights
We were against some top competition in the Mechmadness. After our very tight win against the Jane 1.5, I mentioned that I would be keen to giveaway a Constellation if we won the thing. Apparently that's a against the competition rules, I accept full responsibility of this - was just a moment of excitement etc. but the current results were not affected by the post as the votes were already over.
In regards to the giveaway, we've never given away free constellations (or any boards for that matter), all our streamers and influencers either borrowed or bought their units. I'll still be keen to do a giveaway once we have r2 instock...
Round 2 is underway, being machined and starting anodisation soon. We'll have a range of colours available, but nothing to reveal yet. We also have another exciting announcement regarding the constellation later on. There are very minor changes to R2, based on feedback on R1, mostly to do with tolerances.
We have an amazing amount of sound tests and sound science on our discord, just check out the #constellation and #constellation-sound-test channels.
I am currently testing UHWMPE plates, to add that to our plate types.
Soon(tm).
We have received the OCE allotment of the collaboration board After and Noon. Most of these have gone out already, with a few about to leave the warehouse once we have the boxes in place. If you haven't confirmed your address with ZTBoards, please do this now, so you don't delay your board.
Extras will be sold at one of our mini meets in Sydney. We'll be doing a collaboration stream/launch party with ZTBoards to celebrate their success on delivering their GB - even through the ups and downs of covid, Chinese new year, shipping surcharges and changing currency conversions. Congrats to ZTBoards on completing their GB! We'll have more info on the launch party as we finalise our extras and get a schedule in place with the boys from America.
KIKUICHIMONJI
Last year I made a promise to bring this FRL TKL to the market, especially after some dramas regarding the layout of the board. Due to the disruptions of last year, and the completion of constellation, the kukiomonji project was kept on hold until our capacity and funds opened up.
We've done 2 rounds of prototypes and Biso has confirmed fitment tests. We are underway with the machining and anodisation. PCBS and daughterboards are already at our warehouse, so once we have these instock, we'll be selling them. There are 99 in total, 33 of each colour (Black, gray and silver).
STREAMING
We have acquired some gear to enable us to stream. We'll be streaming builds, community pieces, and who knows what else. We'll announce more when it's all set up and we have cleaned our very messy warehouse.
AESWITCHES
It's been a while since Raeds and Naevies have come out in the market, however they are just now being discovered. It's great to see some organic discovery as well as people who are joining in through hype.
Theremingoat has done a review on raeds, and naevies. We've still got some stock as well as our partners over at Canonkeys, IlumKB, deskeys.io and Salvun. Recently we added Ashkeebs to service Canada, and introducing our Indian partner - stackskb.
Currently in development is a community round of switches for Australia. These will be available for Australians, using our colours of snags, and the ol' green and gold. For internationals, we may open some purchases through our stream or discord. These will have couple of the changes I want to make for the Round 2 of raeds and naevies - but before I roll it out to those, I wanted a smaller control group to get these feedback.
Some changes include:
- New tighter tops / top mold
- New 5pin bottom mold
- New springs
- Possibly new nylon mix for bottom mold
Looking forward to getting these in and getting some feedback! The dream is to make great, affordable, stock switches, and while some of our competition is claiming that there is a need to increase prices, we think that our pricing is sustainable for our development and fair for the consumer.
PERCEBE
Wilba is underway putting ESD on both the solderable and hotswap version of the percebee layout. It is a really nice and useable smaller form layout, and hope that people will enjoy using this.We'll have Idyllic making cases for percebe down the track, as well as our own AEBoards percebe keyboard.
A big thank you to Zambumon for allowing me to bring this project to life.
EXT65
Xelus is currently doing exams - but there is some progress on hotswap pcbs. We will need to do some prototypes and testing before we can confirm anything more.
Soon(tm).