00:00SPEAKER- Hey Jesse, tell Brad about the electronics markets
00:02SPEAKERin China, please.
00:03SPEAKER- I need to hear about the Shenzhen markets.
00:04SPEAKER- So sadly, they appear to be like,
00:07SPEAKERwell, they may or may not be dying out,
00:09SPEAKERbut they've been moving around.
00:11SPEAKERThey've been getting, every time I've been there,
00:13SPEAKERmore and more of the buildings have been getting renovated.
00:16SPEAKERThe place you used to be able to get the fake iPhones
00:18SPEAKERbecame a perfume market.
00:21SPEAKERIt's nuts.
00:22SPEAKER- But they're like multi-story, essentially like,
00:26SPEAKERaisles and aisles and aisles of booths, right?
00:28SPEAKER- It is a district of Shenzhen.
00:31SPEAKERIt's the Wajan Bay and Wajan Nan,
00:33SPEAKERso Wajan Road, north and south.
00:38SPEAKERThere is literally a shopping mall full of iPhone cases.
00:43SPEAKERAnd each time you go, each time I've gone,
00:45SPEAKERthere have been different trendy things.
00:48SPEAKER- Okay.
00:49SPEAKER- So we had, I would usually have a day or two
00:52SPEAKERto kill in Shenzhen and I was usually kind of bummed out
00:55SPEAKERwith the old factory.
00:56SPEAKERAnd so at some point I tweeted,
00:59SPEAKER"Hey, would anyone wanna give me 50 bucks
01:01SPEAKER"and I'll send you some random crap from Shenzhen?"
01:03SPEAKERAnd got enough takers that I put a random box of crap
01:09SPEAKERfrom Shenzhen for $50 on our Shopify storefront.
01:13SPEAKERI limited it to 20 and I said it was only gonna be shipped
01:17SPEAKERto the States because I didn't want a deal.
01:20SPEAKERAnd it sold out in a couple of hours.
01:21SPEAKERThe second time around, I think we limited it to 100
01:24SPEAKERand it sold out in minutes.
01:26SPEAKERBut that first box, everybody got a tiny little drone.
01:32SPEAKEREverybody got a crazy cable
01:35SPEAKERthat was both a USB, a micro-USB and a lightning cable
01:40SPEAKERin the same connector.
01:41SPEAKERI showed it to a friend at Apple and he basically melted.
01:45SPEAKERAnd everybody got a fidget spinner.
01:48SPEAKEREverybody got a fidget spinner
01:49SPEAKERlike two weeks before they broke here.
01:52SPEAKERI remember the year that we talked about this
01:55SPEAKERand I was like, "These fidgets, but this is so stupid.
01:58SPEAKER"Nobody's ever gonna do this."
02:00SPEAKERAnd meanwhile, our friend, Zach, who's Inventable Zach
02:03SPEAKERwas routing out fidget spinners for anybody who wanted them
02:07SPEAKERin another room at the event we were at.
02:12SPEAKERBut it's also really...
02:15SPEAKERSo I love watching videos of people going to these.
02:17SPEAKERI mean, most of them are, like you said,
02:19SPEAKERprobably from like 2015 at this point, I think.
02:22SPEAKER- There is plenty of current content.
02:26SPEAKERI mean, there's a whole mall of tiny little iPhone
02:30SPEAKERand other phone repair shops.
02:34SPEAKERI have had the privilege of getting to wander around
02:36SPEAKERWajan Nan on the other side of the road
02:39SPEAKERwith Scotty from Strange Parts.
02:41SPEAKERScotty, you may know, is the guy who built his own iPhone,
02:45SPEAKERwho added a headphone jack back to a lightning-only iPhone.
02:51SPEAKERHe's done all kinds of amazing stuff,
02:53SPEAKERbut he took me on a tour of sort of his favorite vendors,
02:57SPEAKERlike the woman who would sell
02:59SPEAKERunpopulated iPhone logic boards,
03:01SPEAKERor the place you could buy a strip of a dozen A8 chips,
03:07SPEAKERlike iPhone core chips.
03:10SPEAKERLike talking to Apple friends,
03:12SPEAKERyou cannot actually use these things
03:14SPEAKERwithout being able to fuse them with Apple-only tooling,
03:17SPEAKERbut they clearly fell off the back of a truck somewhere.
03:22SPEAKERMost of these markets,
03:24SPEAKERthey've got lots and lots of stuff out everywhere.
03:26SPEAKERYou can touch things.
03:28SPEAKERAnd then there's the one market where you go up
03:30SPEAKERand there is basically nothing out.
03:32SPEAKERThere are some price lists on shelves
03:35SPEAKERand everybody has a big safe,
03:37SPEAKERand that's the place you can buy used iPads.
03:40SPEAKERAnd it is not a place for tourists.
03:41SPEAKERIt is a place for people to go buy hardware.
03:45SPEAKERIt's like, do not take pictures, be respectful.
03:49SPEAKERIt is, in most of the markets, haggling is normal.
03:53SPEAKERIn this market, there is no haggling.
03:55SPEAKERIf you try to haggle,
03:57SPEAKERthen basically know that you're a tourist.
03:59SPEAKER- Wow.
04:00SPEAKER- In a lot of the markets,
04:02SPEAKERthese are not really mostly there for individual sale.
04:07SPEAKERThey're mostly wholesale.
04:08SPEAKEREverybody here has a Taobao shop and an AliExpress shop.
04:14SPEAKEREverybody I know who lives in Shenzhen
04:15SPEAKERhas stories of buying something on Taobao
04:18SPEAKERand having it show up 10 minutes later
04:20SPEAKER'cause the shop they ordered it from on the internet
04:22SPEAKERwas like three doors down.
04:25SPEAKERBut you would say, "I want to buy one."
04:27SPEAKERAnd they're like, "No, don't want to sell one."
04:28SPEAKERWe're like, but if you go and say,
04:31SPEAKER"How much does it cost to buy 50?"
04:33SPEAKEROkay, can I buy a sample?
04:36SPEAKEREverybody loves that.
04:37SPEAKER- Of course.
04:39SPEAKER- You know, don't be a dick about it, but that's...
04:42SPEAKER- What's the weirdest, best thing?
04:45SPEAKERLike, do you have anything that you use all the time
04:47SPEAKERthat came from there, Jesse, still?
04:50SPEAKER- The force tester that I use to test how the force curves
04:56SPEAKERon a key switch is something that is a Chinese clone
05:00SPEAKERof a thousand dollar Japanese item
05:01SPEAKERthat I bought for about a hundred bucks in those markets
05:04SPEAKERthat's sitting on my desk.
05:06SPEAKER- If it works.
05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it's great.
05:09SPEAKERThe serial protocol speaks as a little bit weird,
05:12SPEAKERbut it's a serial protocol that I can read.
05:15SPEAKERI had to reverse engineer it,
05:16SPEAKERbut that was not a huge thing.
05:20SPEAKER- Sounds like a pretty good score.
05:21SPEAKERSo was it safe to assume you pass on the loose strip of A8s?
05:26SPEAKER- I did pass on the strip of A8s,
05:27SPEAKERbut I did buy the logic board 'cause that was just cool.
05:31SPEAKERI have a couple of fake iPhones.
05:33SPEAKEROne was a fake iPhone mini
05:35SPEAKERthat was an inch and a half tall.
05:37SPEAKER(laughing)
05:39SPEAKER- It's a mini iPhone mini.
05:40SPEAKER- Yeah, sorry, this was a 2016 era iPhone mini
05:45SPEAKERwhen that wasn't a thing.
05:47SPEAKERI bought it, I tried to plug in a micro USB cable
05:50SPEAKERto charge it, it wasn't charging.
05:51SPEAKERAnd I looked a little closer and I realized
05:53SPEAKERit's 'cause it had a lightning port.
05:55SPEAKER- Of course.
05:56SPEAKER- I was in, of course it did.
05:58SPEAKERI was in Shenzhen shortly after the iPhone 10 launched.
06:04SPEAKERAnd I went into the Ming Tong Digital Plaza
06:06SPEAKERwhere you would buy your fake iPhones.
06:09SPEAKERAnd I wandered around for a while
06:11SPEAKERand I found a place that had fake iPhone 10s
06:14SPEAKERand start talking to them and say like,
06:16SPEAKER"I want to buy one of these."
06:18SPEAKERAnd they talked to me for a while about it
06:21SPEAKERand say, "Okay, I'll buy that one."
06:22SPEAKERAnd they said, "No, no, no, you don't want that one.
06:24SPEAKER"You want the one that has the good display.
06:26SPEAKER"Also, it reports itself as having twice as much storage."
06:30SPEAKER(laughing)
06:31SPEAKERI'm like, "Twice as much storage?"
06:33SPEAKERYes, both of them only have 16,
06:35SPEAKERbut that one reports 128 instead of 64.
06:38SPEAKER(laughing)
06:39SPEAKERThey had iPhone 10s from three different vendors
06:43SPEAKERwith three different fake versions of iOS.
06:47SPEAKERThe one I bought, I brought home
06:50SPEAKERand I showed it to a friend who's an engineer for Apple
06:53SPEAKERand he promptly opens up System Preferences
06:54SPEAKERand starts looking at what it reports as build number.
06:59SPEAKERAnd he's like, "So I know this,
07:01SPEAKER"you can't actually tell it's Android
07:03SPEAKER"until you get a little bit deep in,
07:07SPEAKER"at least in most of the apps."
07:08SPEAKERAnd he's like, "The build number is correctly formed,
07:11SPEAKER"but this is a build from next year."
07:13SPEAKER(laughing)
07:16SPEAKERAt the time, they even had what was then the new App Store.
07:21SPEAKERAnd it was a fake Apple App Store
07:24SPEAKERand it had clearly been back translated from Chinese
07:28SPEAKERbecause it said in giant bold letters,
07:30SPEAKER"Where is my apps?"
07:31SPEAKER(laughing)
07:33SPEAKERListen, I've heard Shenzhen
07:34SPEAKERis kind of a magical electronics wonderland,
07:37SPEAKERbut I really wasn't expecting iPhones from the future.
07:40SPEAKER(upbeat music)
08:00SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
08:09SPEAKERWelcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
08:11SPEAKERI'm Will.
08:12SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
08:13SPEAKER- And today we're joined by a very special guest.
08:16SPEAKERJesse Vincent of keyboardio is joining us today
08:18SPEAKERto talk about, well, I mean, mechanical keyboards,
08:22SPEAKERmaking stuff, Chinese electronic markets, what else?
08:26SPEAKERAnything, I feel like that's a good-
08:29SPEAKER- It's a good smattering.
08:31SPEAKER- Sounds good to me.
08:32SPEAKER- I can't see a shrug, Jesse, go.
08:35SPEAKER- Anyway, hey, I'm Jesse.
08:36SPEAKERNice to meet you everybody.
08:38SPEAKER- Thank you so much for coming on, Jesse.
08:40SPEAKERI have used your keyboards for several years now.
08:43SPEAKERI'm a fan and you have a Kickstarter going right now
08:47SPEAKERfor the latest version
08:49SPEAKERof your mechanical ergonomic keyboard,
08:53SPEAKERwhich we'll get to in a little bit, I guess.
08:55SPEAKERBut I kind of want to start, like, what's your,
08:57SPEAKERyou've been doing this for a long time now.
08:59SPEAKERI'm kind of curious how you got started making,
09:02SPEAKERlike, as a, like, I don't want to say artisan keyboards
09:05SPEAKER'cause they're like small batch keyboards.
09:08SPEAKERThey're awesome.
09:09SPEAKERI love them and they're very cool and they're special.
09:11SPEAKER- I mean, there's wood in there.
09:12SPEAKERI think it's okay to say artisan.
09:14SPEAKER- Yeah, okay.
09:16SPEAKER- I mean, our goal, of course,
09:17SPEAKERis that they should be large batch keyboards,
09:19SPEAKERbut this did very much start off as a hobby project.
09:22SPEAKERI had spent a career in software.
09:25SPEAKERI did, spent time being responsible for Perl.
09:29SPEAKERI used to make an email client for Android.
09:32SPEAKERI had had a SaaS startup that I'd been working on
09:35SPEAKERthat cratered for very reasonable reasons.
09:38SPEAKERAnd I swore that I was gonna take a year off to screw around.
09:42SPEAKERAnd about six months in,
09:45SPEAKERI realized that there were folks on the internet
09:47SPEAKERwho were making their own keyboards.
09:49SPEAKERAnd I've had bad risks my whole life.
09:52SPEAKERAnd that seemed like a lot of fun.
09:55SPEAKERAnd I figured-
09:56SPEAKER- This was like 2014, probably?
09:58SPEAKER- 2012, this was like 2012, I think.
10:00SPEAKER- Okay.
10:01SPEAKER- This was a while back.
10:03SPEAKERIt was before keyboards were cool, you know.
10:06SPEAKERNo, we totally took a little too long
10:09SPEAKERto get our first thing out and keyboards got hip
10:12SPEAKERbefore we launched the first keyboard.
10:15SPEAKERBut this was only intended to be a hobby project
10:18SPEAKERfor a single month to make a single keyboard for myself.
10:23SPEAKERAs I say this kind of often, we failed thousands
10:25SPEAKERand thousands of times over in the best possible way.
10:30SPEAKERBut that first keyboard that I made for myself,
10:33SPEAKERit was something like 40 hours of soldering
10:35SPEAKERbecause I hadn't soldered since I was eight
10:37SPEAKERand had no idea what I was doing.
10:40SPEAKEROne of the first mistakes I made is that I soldered
10:43SPEAKERall of the diodes in series rather than in parallel.
10:48SPEAKERYou know, it's like I learned-
10:50SPEAKER- Hold on, what happens when you do that?
10:51SPEAKERDoes that mean that one press-
10:52SPEAKER- It just doesn't work so well.
10:56SPEAKER- Okay.
10:57SPEAKER- And also I was doing all of this freehand
11:00SPEAKERwith no circuit board because at the time
11:01SPEAKERit seemed like it would be scary to make circuit boards
11:04SPEAKERand it would be easier to just have a big old mess of wires.
11:08SPEAKERI've been forbidden to ever make a keyboard like that again.
11:12SPEAKERBut these days I know how to design
11:14SPEAKERa reasonably simple circuit board
11:16SPEAKERand there are plenty of suppliers
11:17SPEAKERthat'll let us make them for cheap.
11:19SPEAKERBut anyway, this was supposed to be a one month hobby project
11:23SPEAKERand that was like, dear God, possibly nine years ago now.
11:26SPEAKER- So it's really funny 'cause I've had,
11:29SPEAKERlike in my ancient history, when I was at Maximum PC,
11:32SPEAKERI was the keyboard and mouse guy for a long time.
11:35SPEAKERAnd there was a moment when the Microsoft natural comfort,
11:39SPEAKERthe forward tilt, the negative angle, I guess,
11:43SPEAKERis what everybody calls it now.
11:48SPEAKERKeyboard came out, I was like, oh, this is really cool.
11:50SPEAKERBut it was a membrane keyboard
11:51SPEAKERand it was like, they were, the price was right.
11:52SPEAKERThey were like 25 to 50 bucks or something like that.
11:56SPEAKERAnd that keyboard solved a lot of my risk problems.
11:59SPEAKERAnd I remember going to Logitech and Microsoft
12:02SPEAKERand the people that were making gaming keyboards
12:04SPEAKERat the time, it's like, hey, why is nobody making
12:06SPEAKERan ergonomic gaming keyboard?
12:08SPEAKERAnd they laughed at me and they were like,
12:09SPEAKERit's 'cause we like to sell products.
12:11SPEAKERYou know, we were not doing that.
12:14SPEAKERAnd then a few years later, mechanical keyboards
12:17SPEAKERstarted taking off and I remember talking to Logitech
12:21SPEAKERand saying, hey, why aren't you all doing
12:22SPEAKERa mechanical keyboard?
12:23SPEAKERAnd they're like, well, if we made a mechanical keyboard,
12:25SPEAKERwe would absorb the entire cherry switch production
12:28SPEAKERcapability for the planet on one product.
12:31SPEAKERAnd I was like, well, that's a little bit,
12:33SPEAKERI mean, that's kind of a flex, but okay.
12:35SPEAKER- That sounds right.
12:35SPEAKER- This was in probably 2011.
12:37SPEAKER- That's correct. - And now everybody's doing,
12:41SPEAKERyou know, well, everybody's doing mechanical keyboards.
12:43SPEAKERThey're all using pretty standard switches
12:45SPEAKERfor the most part now, or at least have that as an option.
12:48SPEAKERAnd the world has turned kind of your way in a lot of ways.
12:53SPEAKER- It has.
12:54SPEAKERSo the Microsoft Natural Series are amazing.
12:57SPEAKERThey are the, I mean, I typed on one for five plus years,
13:01SPEAKERor rather I typed on a long series of them.
13:03SPEAKERI had one in my backpack at all times.
13:06SPEAKERI was that dude at the conference
13:08SPEAKERwho had the Microsoft Natural Keyboard balanced in his lap
13:11SPEAKERbecause it was the only way my wrist would not hurt.
13:14SPEAKEROne of the problems with the Natural Elite,
13:17SPEAKERsort of the white one that was sort of the best known,
13:20SPEAKERlongest lasting model,
13:22SPEAKERis that its traces melted in the rain.
13:25SPEAKERIt was during the era in which you can imagine
13:27SPEAKERa Microsoft would make a keyboard
13:28SPEAKERthat would melt in the rain.
13:31SPEAKER- Hold on, what do you mean melted in the rain?
13:33SPEAKERI don't know if it's-
13:34SPEAKER- I mean that if it got wet, it was ruined forever.
13:36SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
13:36SPEAKER- I bought them in five packs.
13:38SPEAKER(laughing)
13:39SPEAKERLiterally. - Okay, interesting.
13:41SPEAKER- Microsoft made a small business home office,
13:44SPEAKERfive pack SKU of that keyboard.
13:46SPEAKER- Wow.
13:48SPEAKER- But 2012, 2013 is right around when we started
13:52SPEAKERlooking at manufacturing mechanical keyboards.
13:55SPEAKERI remember trying to source Cherry switches and it was hard.
14:00SPEAKERI later talked to the regional sales director for Cherry,
14:06SPEAKERsaid like, look, what happened is the bottom fell out
14:09SPEAKERof the mechanical keyboard market,
14:11SPEAKERsort of when a good few years back
14:15SPEAKERand the company got rid of most of its key switch
14:19SPEAKERmaking machinery because no one was buying them.
14:22SPEAKERAnd those are each individually million dollar machines
14:25SPEAKER'cause Cherry switches continue to be made only in Germany.
14:29SPEAKERAnd so there really was not inventory.
14:32SPEAKERThat flex from Logitech doesn't actually sound
14:35SPEAKERlike it was a flex.
14:38SPEAKERI remember when we were designing the Model 1,
14:41SPEAKERwe had intended to use Cherry switches
14:43SPEAKERand we approached Cherry's Asia reseller
14:48SPEAKERwho told us that they could get us enough switches
14:51SPEAKERfor a thousand keyboards at a reasonable price
14:54SPEAKERby skimming them off some other larger orders
14:57SPEAKERand that they could guarantee that in an eight
15:00SPEAKERor 12 week lead and that past that it might be hard
15:04SPEAKERbut they could do that.
15:07SPEAKERAnd we were already gonna make more than a thousand keyboards
15:10SPEAKERand so it was the realization that there just
15:13SPEAKERwas not availability of switches
15:16SPEAKEReven from somebody who wanted to help us.
15:18SPEAKERAnd that led us down a rabbit hole.
15:21SPEAKERThat whole world was completely changed.
15:23SPEAKERWhat caused its changes that Cherry's patents expired.
15:26SPEAKERAnd the first couple generations of clone switches
15:30SPEAKERfrom China were, well garbage is the easy way
15:34SPEAKERto describe them.
15:35SPEAKERI actually went into Kiowa with their brown switch
15:40SPEAKERand Cherry's brown switch and I said like look,
15:43SPEAKERthese feel different.
15:46SPEAKERThe salesperson went and got an engineer
15:48SPEAKERand the engineer explained that they're supposed
15:51SPEAKERto feel different, their switch has 10% longer life.
15:54SPEAKERSo that's great, would you be interested,
15:56SPEAKERcould you make something that feels
15:58SPEAKERlike the Cherry switches?
15:59SPEAKERAnd at the time they said like look,
16:01SPEAKERour boss wants to make our own products,
16:03SPEAKERnot switches that feel like anybody else's
16:05SPEAKERand they don't really want to do custom work.
16:08SPEAKERNow that's all changed.
16:09SPEAKER- Well yeah, I was gonna say now,
16:11SPEAKERthere's like switch proliferation,
16:14SPEAKERthere's five different new switches that come out a week
16:16SPEAKERit seems like, some weeks.
16:17SPEAKER- It's nuts, I mean I have these boards,
16:21SPEAKERbasically I have switch testers
16:22SPEAKERwith a couple hundred different switch variants on them.
16:25SPEAKERAnd this is only the stock switches
16:28SPEAKERfrom various manufacturers.
16:29SPEAKERSo I have a line of 20 different red switches
16:32SPEAKERthat are all supposed to feel the same.
16:34SPEAKERA line of 20 different brown switches
16:36SPEAKERthat are all supposed to feel the same.
16:39SPEAKERAnd they're all varying qualities and have varying feels.
16:41SPEAKERBut now there's this huge proliferation
16:45SPEAKERof switches being designed by hobbyists
16:49SPEAKERand either commissioning Kiwa or Gateron or Durock
16:55SPEAKERor one of a couple other switch factories
16:58SPEAKERto make a variant where it's make this piece
17:01SPEAKERout of this, excuse me,
17:03SPEAKERmake this piece out of this material,
17:04SPEAKERmake this piece out of that material.
17:06SPEAKERThe top needs to be yellow,
17:08SPEAKERthe bottom needs to be day-glo purple.
17:13SPEAKERAnd there's a lot, part of my problem with this
17:16SPEAKERis how much these switches get sold for.
17:19SPEAKERBecause if you're buying direct from the factory
17:23SPEAKERand are a Chinese factory customer,
17:27SPEAKERyou are probably not paying more than 15 cents US a switch.
17:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:32SPEAKER- And these switches sometimes get sold
17:33SPEAKERfor upwards of a dollar each.
17:35SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:36SPEAKERWell, I mean, it's weird.
17:38SPEAKER'Cause like once I realized that I could buy switches
17:41SPEAKERfrom AliExpress, it kind of changed my relationship
17:45SPEAKERwith switches.
17:47SPEAKERIt's a mixed bag.
17:48SPEAKERLike sometimes you'll get a bag and like-
17:50SPEAKER- Quite literally.
17:51SPEAKER- Literally it's a mixed, yeah,
17:52SPEAKERliterally it's a mixed bag, Brad.
17:53SPEAKERIt's like, there'll be 15 bad switches
17:56SPEAKERin a bag of 60 or 80 or whatever.
18:00SPEAKER- That's fast, that suggests to me
18:02SPEAKERthat somebody buying rejects.
18:04SPEAKER- I mean, that's all I can assume.
18:05SPEAKERBut they're also so cheap, I don't care.
18:08SPEAKERLike it works out.
18:10SPEAKER- So what's funny is if you look at like the
18:14SPEAKERmajor switch resellers Shopify site,
18:17SPEAKERtheir AliExpress site and their Taobao site.
18:22SPEAKERTaobao being the essentially Chinese AliExpress
18:25SPEAKERfor the Chinese market.
18:26SPEAKERThe pricing just drops and drops and drops
18:28SPEAKERas it goes from the fancy Shopify site
18:30SPEAKERto AliExpress to domestic.
18:34SPEAKERYeah, it's wild.
18:35SPEAKER- It's such a weird time.
18:37SPEAKERLike it's been really fun.
18:38SPEAKER'Cause like when we started testing,
18:40SPEAKERthis was one of those like weird markets
18:42SPEAKERthat where I was like, oh, this is cool.
18:43SPEAKERWe should pay attention to this.
18:45SPEAKERAnd then it's just exploded.
18:47SPEAKERAnd now, like I said, like Logitech and Corsair
18:50SPEAKERand Razer and all the big keyboard manufacturers
18:52SPEAKERare making mechs now.
18:55SPEAKER- Okay, so let's roll back and go.
18:59SPEAKERI wanna talk about your journey with the model one.
19:02SPEAKERBecause like you told me this story before
19:05SPEAKERand it's a good story.
19:07SPEAKERBut you also learned, I think every hard lesson
19:10SPEAKERabout hardware manufacturing.
19:12SPEAKERYou're one of the, your story is one of the reasons
19:15SPEAKERwhen people ask me if they should do a hardware startup.
19:17SPEAKERI'm like, no, probably not.
19:18SPEAKERIt seems like really, it's really hard.
19:21SPEAKER- So we definitely played on hard mode the first time around.
19:25SPEAKERAnd we didn't know we were playing on hard mode.
19:28SPEAKERWe came into this having never manufactured
19:31SPEAKERand shipped products before, which is good.
19:33SPEAKER'Cause if we knew what we were getting into,
19:34SPEAKERwe absolutely wouldn't have gotten started.
19:38SPEAKERBut the original plan for the keyboardio model one
19:41SPEAKERwas going to be laser cut plywood
19:43SPEAKERand an Arduino socketed on a PCB
19:46SPEAKERand assembled in our living room.
19:48SPEAKERBrady Forrest suckered me into applying for highway one,
19:52SPEAKERwhich was an incubator that he was helping run at the time.
19:55SPEAKERAnd running through that, we visited Shenzhen
20:00SPEAKERfor the first time.
20:02SPEAKERWe got a bunch of, we made a bunch of very good connections
20:06SPEAKERin the industry around the Bay Area.
20:09SPEAKERWe sort of learned what it looked like to make hardware
20:13SPEAKERand we were forced to have the discipline to try
20:17SPEAKERbecause it quickly became not a hobby business.
20:21SPEAKERBut when it started off, I had hand assembled
20:24SPEAKERa couple of keyboards and had written a blog post
20:26SPEAKERabout everything I screwed up
20:28SPEAKERthe first time I made a keyboard.
20:31SPEAKER- This was the wires one
20:32SPEAKERthat you talked about a minute ago, right?
20:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that was like one little problem.
20:37SPEAKERBut on a lark, I'd added a signup for my mailing list
20:42SPEAKERif you wanna know about our keyboards.
20:44SPEAKERJust having no idea what I was gonna do with it.
20:47SPEAKERAnd then I went to bed and the next morning,
20:48SPEAKERit was at the top of Hacker News.
20:50SPEAKERAnd the next day, it was still at the top of Hacker News.
20:52SPEAKERAnd there were a thousand people on our mailing list.
20:55SPEAKERAnd then I wrote a part two the next weekend
20:57SPEAKERand that stayed at the top of Hacker News for a day.
21:01SPEAKERAnd a couple of prototypes in, people started saying,
21:04SPEAKER"Hey, where can we buy that?"
21:06SPEAKERThese were these like laser cut pieces of acrylic
21:09SPEAKERwith freehand wires and all kinds of craziness.
21:14SPEAKERBut people wanted to buy them.
21:16SPEAKERAnd so we figured, well, we'll try to do this thing.
21:19SPEAKERWe made, I think, three prototypes and asked our mailing list
21:24SPEAKERwould anyone like to beta test this hardware
21:26SPEAKERthat we might kickstart?
21:29SPEAKERAnd we sent out mail to that mailing list
21:31SPEAKERand got back something like 100 or 125 replies
21:34SPEAKERwithin 24 hours from people explaining
21:36SPEAKERwhy they needed to be the one to beta test.
21:39SPEAKERWe had people writing poetry, prose, creepy fanfic.
21:45SPEAKEROne dude in Hong Kong recorded a music video
21:49SPEAKERshot in three locations
21:51SPEAKERabout why he needed to be a beta tester.
21:54SPEAKER- Please tell me he got it.
21:55SPEAKER- Oh, hell yes.
21:56SPEAKER- That's a lot of effort.
21:58SPEAKER- Yeah, no, and then when I went to visit Shenzhen,
22:00SPEAKERI actually got to meet him, which was super cool.
22:03SPEAKER- That's awesome.
22:04SPEAKER- Yeah, but, and that was right around
22:07SPEAKERwhen we applied to Highway 1, got into Highway 1,
22:11SPEAKERran through it and sort of had to make it more real
22:15SPEAKERthan laser cut plywood and an Arduino stuck
22:18SPEAKERon a circuit board.
22:20SPEAKER- It's, okay, so you've got a Highway 1,
22:25SPEAKERI assume at that point you started,
22:27SPEAKERHighway 1 was a hardware incubator, right?
22:28SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, exclusively.
22:31SPEAKER- And at that point, you got connected with designers
22:37SPEAKERand kind of, they did the thing that accelerators
22:39SPEAKERare supposed to do where they helped you learn
22:41SPEAKERthe hard parts the easy way rather than the hard way,
22:43SPEAKERor at least some of them?
22:45SPEAKER- They, we were only the second batch and so they were,
22:49SPEAKERthey were still definitely feeling their way.
22:51SPEAKERAnd they were an accelerator that was tied
22:54SPEAKERto a manufacturing company.
22:57SPEAKERAnd so there was, it was a little bit of,
22:59SPEAKERthere was some intent that it might be a feeder
23:01SPEAKERfor their, for what their, what's called low volume,
23:06SPEAKERhigh mix manufacturing, where they can make a small number
23:11SPEAKERfor a large company of lots of different products.
23:15SPEAKERThat didn't end up panning out, but they gave us some sense
23:18SPEAKERof what it looked like to manufacture.
23:22SPEAKERBut we were still kind of doing things at a different scale
23:24SPEAKERthan everybody else.
23:25SPEAKERWe were thinking low thousands production volume
23:30SPEAKERfor that first production run, if we got lucky.
23:35SPEAKERThere's this thing called the valley of death in hardware.
23:38SPEAKERAnd it's, if you're making more than 100
23:39SPEAKERand less than 10,000 or less than 100,000,
23:42SPEAKERit's gonna hurt real bad because 100 you can absolutely do
23:47SPEAKERat your kitchen table, 10,000, it's worth money
23:52SPEAKERto have process automation and all that.
23:57SPEAKERA thousand, you can't hand assemble
23:59SPEAKERand it does not make sense to make a robot.
24:03SPEAKER- Yeah. - But a lot's changed
24:05SPEAKERsince this conventional wisdom became conventional wisdom.
24:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say the big thing seems to be
24:10SPEAKERthat Kickstarter kind of, Kickstarter helped a lot of people
24:16SPEAKERboth land in that spot and get through that spot,
24:19SPEAKERit seemed like, and I'm curious how it worked out for you.
24:22SPEAKER- I mean, Kickstarter helps you get into that problem.
24:24SPEAKERI don't know that it helps you get out of that problem
24:27SPEAKERbecause, so we love Kickstarter.
24:31SPEAKERI mean, there's a reason why pretty much every serious thing
24:34SPEAKERwe've launched has been a Kickstarter.
24:37SPEAKERIt is really convenient to be able to go to your manufacturer
24:40SPEAKERand say, "Hey, look, we have committed orders
24:43SPEAKER"for this number of parts and we even have the money
24:45SPEAKER"from those customers so we can afford to pay for tooling."
24:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:50SPEAKER- Even this time around some suppliers
24:52SPEAKERwho had been very lukewarm on working with us
24:55SPEAKERdiscovered the Kickstarter about a weekend,
24:57SPEAKERsaw that we had hit our $100,000 goal in 18 minutes
25:00SPEAKERand gone over $300,000 in like the first day or so
25:04SPEAKERand became a lot more solicitous.
25:07SPEAKER- I was gonna say, we should explain what tooling is
25:09SPEAKERfor people who may not know 'cause it's a manufacturing
25:11SPEAKERconcept and I bet a lot of people don't understand
25:13SPEAKERwhat you're talking about.
25:14SPEAKER- Yeah, so in the, you know, people ask us
25:19SPEAKERsomething as simple as the rubber feet on our keyboard.
25:22SPEAKERSo somebody's, one has fallen off and a customer is saying,
25:25SPEAKER"Hey, where can I, what's the part number for this?
25:27SPEAKER"Where can I buy it?"
25:28SPEAKERAnd we have to explain that there is pretty much nothing
25:31SPEAKERthat comes off the shelf when you're manufacturing.
25:34SPEAKERThose rubber feet are from a custom mold
25:40SPEAKERthat was made, I think that one might actually be
25:43SPEAKERsimply out of aluminum.
25:45SPEAKERIn China where they compress silicone
25:49SPEAKERinside these two pieces of metal
25:52SPEAKERto get the exact shapes we want.
25:54SPEAKERIt is not apart from McMaster.
25:57SPEAKERFor keycaps, the way that those are made in volume
26:02SPEAKERis you've got two giant hunks of steel
26:04SPEAKERthat have holes cut into them
26:06SPEAKERand then they spray molten plastic into them
26:09SPEAKERunder huge amounts of pressure
26:11SPEAKERand it'll cool off relatively quickly inside that tooling,
26:15SPEAKERinside those hunks of steel and when they pop open,
26:17SPEAKERyou've got these warm, hot off the presses keycaps.
26:21SPEAKER- Have you seen this happen?
26:22SPEAKERHave you been to the factory where they do this?
26:24SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, I have, when we were doing the Atrius,
26:27SPEAKERwhich is our last keyboard, I was there the day
26:30SPEAKERthey were doing the test runs for the sort of the tray,
26:34SPEAKERthe bottom part of the keyboard
26:35SPEAKERand I literally was able to grab pieces
26:38SPEAKERas they popped out of the injection mold,
26:41SPEAKERliterally hot off the presses.
26:44SPEAKER- Okay, so you started with the board design,
26:48SPEAKERyou knew you wanted to do an ergo design or a split design
26:53SPEAKERbut also you were using, because of that you were using,
26:56SPEAKERthere weren't keycaps, you couldn't buy off the shelf
26:58SPEAKERkeycaps, right?
26:59SPEAKER- Well, so when we first got started,
27:02SPEAKERwe assumed we were gonna do what a lot of these
27:05SPEAKERergonomic mechanical keyboards do,
27:07SPEAKERwhich is just have some gaps in the spacing
27:09SPEAKERon the keyboard, that's the sort of standard thing.
27:13SPEAKERWe got told by somebody who has advised
27:17SPEAKERone of the largest companies in the world
27:19SPEAKERon their ergonomic keyboards, that there was no way
27:22SPEAKERwe would be able to afford custom tooling for 64 keycaps
27:26SPEAKERbecause that is an investment of hundreds
27:28SPEAKERof thousands of dollars.
27:29SPEAKERBut we verified these facts, they were wrong.
27:33SPEAKERI later met the person who worked for the large company
27:38SPEAKERthat made keyboards and said, oh yeah, that guy,
27:40SPEAKERI gave him that number because that's what it takes
27:42SPEAKERwhen we, giant company, are making this tooling
27:46SPEAKERand we're making six sets of tooling
27:48SPEAKERand we're doing very high volume, very fancy tooling
27:53SPEAKERat a very fancy factory.
27:55SPEAKER- But I mean, in this case, so the tooling is machined out
27:58SPEAKERto be like a negative of the keycap on each side,
28:01SPEAKERand so when it mashes together,
28:03SPEAKERthere's space for the plastic to get shot in and--
28:05SPEAKER- Yes.
28:06SPEAKER- I mean, this is how injection molding works, right?
28:08SPEAKER- Right.
28:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:10SPEAKER- And our keycap tooling absolutely costs
28:12SPEAKERtens of thousands of dollars,
28:13SPEAKERbut it doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
28:14SPEAKER- I thought it was way more expensive than that, holy cow.
28:17SPEAKERI'm gonna get in the keycap business, Jesse.
28:19SPEAKER- We should talk later.
28:20SPEAKER(laughing)
28:22SPEAKER- Just shaking my head. - Really shaking his head no.
28:24SPEAKERSo I was talking about something about the keycap,
28:27SPEAKERabout keycap tooling.
28:29SPEAKER- Oh, about taking the warm caps off the line.
28:32SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.
28:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I've actually got a question there.
28:34SPEAKERI mean, when you're first setting up the tooling
28:36SPEAKERwhen they are popping what I assume are samples out,
28:39SPEAKERI mean, how much trial and error,
28:40SPEAKERhow much iteration is involved there?
28:42SPEAKERDo you have to be there for some period of days
28:44SPEAKERlike checking iterative samples and like tweaking,
28:47SPEAKERlike, okay, this is wrong, this needs to be tweaked?
28:49SPEAKERLike how much--
28:50SPEAKER- It's a lot nicer when you can,
28:53SPEAKERwhich we can't right now.
28:55SPEAKER- Sure.
28:55SPEAKERThe way they describe, the way that manufacturers
28:59SPEAKERtalk about tweaking the tooling as they,
29:02SPEAKERas stuff comes off, as the samples come out
29:05SPEAKERof the injection molds, T0 or T1 is that first trial.
29:09SPEAKERDifferent people say T0 or T1 depending,
29:12SPEAKERand then T2, T3, T4.
29:15SPEAKERAnd usually you need like a couple of tweaks
29:19SPEAKERbefore they get some of the tolerances right.
29:22SPEAKEROur factory for the model 100,
29:26SPEAKERlast week they showed us the T0 key caps
29:29SPEAKERbecause we had to completely redo the key caps
29:32SPEAKERwith the new factory for the new key switches.
29:36SPEAKERThe keys, everything fit with the T0.
29:40SPEAKERThere were some issues with what are called the runners
29:43SPEAKERor the gates that sort of keep the key caps together
29:46SPEAKERas they come out of the mold,
29:47SPEAKERthose they need to improve before mass production.
29:51SPEAKERAnd they got the homing dots wrong on two of the key caps.
29:53SPEAKERThey put them in the wrong place,
29:55SPEAKERwhich is kind of pain, but they'll fix it.
29:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:59SPEAKERWell, when they fix that,
30:01SPEAKERdo they have to completely re-machine the blocks
30:04SPEAKERor can they just solder stuff back in and kind of?
30:07SPEAKER- I mean, it's weld not solder, but that is huge.
30:09SPEAKERI mean, so to, if they need to do something
30:13SPEAKERwhere there should be more plastic
30:15SPEAKERthat ends up in the final product, that's free.
30:18SPEAKERThat's, they just cut more steel away.
30:21SPEAKERWhen they need to remove plastic,
30:24SPEAKERthey need to basically weld something in place.
30:27SPEAKERAnd so what they're gonna end up doing is welding a patch
30:31SPEAKERand then re-machining that little patch.
30:33SPEAKERAnd that can have issues.
30:36SPEAKERYou can end up with sort of a little part line
30:38SPEAKERwhere they did the patch if they don't do it cleanly enough.
30:41SPEAKERAnd we've warned them that if that happens,
30:44SPEAKERthey're going to have to re-machine that entire cavity,
30:47SPEAKERwhich is like, they weld a bigger piece in
30:49SPEAKERand then they machine it again.
30:50SPEAKERIt's not the end of the world, but it's annoying.
30:53SPEAKER- So, okay, so this is maybe a stupid question,
30:55SPEAKERbut when you take the shot key caps out for manufacturing,
30:59SPEAKERare they in a, like a rigid thing of sprue
31:02SPEAKERwhere you can just, then the machine picks them up
31:05SPEAKERand then you can put them on the keyboard all at once
31:07SPEAKERand smash all the caps in place?
31:09SPEAKER- So there are some different ways of doing this.
31:12SPEAKERYou wouldn't usually have, so there,
31:16SPEAKERyou can do it that way at a moderately high end,
31:20SPEAKERbut you may not want to.
31:22SPEAKERIf, for example, the key caps need to get painted
31:24SPEAKERand laser engraved, you probably want to paint them
31:27SPEAKERbefore you put them on the keyboard.
31:29SPEAKER- That makes sense, yeah.
31:30SPEAKER- And so with the Model 1, the factory that did the key caps
31:35SPEAKERhad something that would cut them off the sprue
31:38SPEAKERas they came out of the injection mold,
31:42SPEAKERas they came out of the machine
31:44SPEAKERand slammed them onto a painting jig.
31:48SPEAKERAnd the only problem is that they tried to cheap out
31:50SPEAKERon the amount of steel they needed for the tooling,
31:52SPEAKERso they put them too close together,
31:54SPEAKERso it was impossible to paint all the sides well.
31:57SPEAKERSo they ended up having to then take half them
31:59SPEAKERoff the painting jig.
32:00SPEAKERIt was, ugh, it was a catastrophe.
32:04SPEAKERThey had like a 50% spoilage rate in the beginning.
32:07SPEAKERIt was horrible.
32:08SPEAKERWith, now, conveniently, the factory that's doing
32:11SPEAKERthe Model 100 with us, they helped us do the last run
32:16SPEAKERof key caps for the Model 1, because the previous factory
32:19SPEAKERand we were no longer on speaking terms,
32:21SPEAKERand so they actually ran into this.
32:24SPEAKERThey didn't have the really cool transfer tooling,
32:28SPEAKERtransfer vacuum suction thing, and so they were taking
32:31SPEAKERthe key caps on the sprue out of the tool by hand,
32:36SPEAKERexcept that sprue was designed to fall off,
32:38SPEAKERso the first time they tried to do it,
32:40SPEAKERthe injection molding machine opens,
32:42SPEAKERand the key caps just explode outwards.
32:45SPEAKERTo make it go, they ended up buying foot-wide transfer tape,
32:49SPEAKERso like basically very, very soft masking tape,
32:53SPEAKERand using that to pull the key caps out of the tooling.
32:57SPEAKER- Wow.
32:58SPEAKER- Having seen that, they did a really nice job
33:00SPEAKERon the design for the Model 100,
33:02SPEAKERwhere the sprue becomes the painting jig.
33:04SPEAKERSo the key caps stay on the sprue.
33:06SPEAKERIt's what's called edge gating,
33:08SPEAKERso rather than having the runners or the sprue
33:12SPEAKERthat hold the key caps, or that allow the plastic
33:15SPEAKERto get to the cavities, rather than having that
33:17SPEAKERon the sides of the key caps, it's the bottom edge,
33:20SPEAKERso you won't see a dot on the side of the key cap.
33:23SPEAKER- Oh, that's awesome.
33:24SPEAKERIt's a thing that I think people don't realize
33:27SPEAKERis that when you design a product like this,
33:29SPEAKERit's not just designing the product,
33:30SPEAKERit's also designing the manufacturer for the product,
33:33SPEAKERand every aspect, and how much every aspect of that
33:37SPEAKERhas to be thoughtful, and how much expertise
33:41SPEAKERgoes into all of that.
33:42SPEAKER- I just wanna throw in real fast,
33:44SPEAKERwhen you said at the top of this,
33:45SPEAKERif you had known how hard it would be,
33:46SPEAKERyou wouldn't have done it, and I was just sitting there like,
33:47SPEAKER"Ah, really, is it really that bad?"
33:49SPEAKERAnd I feel like you've already provided
33:50SPEAKERlike three or four examples of,
33:52SPEAKERI've heard things where I was like,
33:54SPEAKER"Yeah, wow, I sure as hell wouldn't do that either."
33:56SPEAKER- Oh man, this is the easy shit.
33:58SPEAKER(laughing)
34:00SPEAKER- Like, I'm sitting here thinking about arguing
34:02SPEAKERwith the factory that screwed up half of your key caps,
34:05SPEAKERand like what resolution that situation might have reached,
34:07SPEAKERyou know, like it just sounds like a lot of trouble.
34:10SPEAKER- So the very long and short of, I mean,
34:15SPEAKERwe went through, with that first keyboard,
34:17SPEAKERwe went through every manufacturing problem
34:20SPEAKERthat anybody has ever heard of.
34:23SPEAKERI don't think that we actually ever,
34:25SPEAKERI don't think we ever actually got handed
34:27SPEAKERparts that we know to have been counterfeit.
34:29SPEAKERBut other than that, anytime we,
34:32SPEAKERand like, we had weird problems.
34:35SPEAKERWe had factories that supposedly closed down for fires.
34:37SPEAKERWe had things that supposedly got lost.
34:41SPEAKERWe had suppliers that, you know,
34:43SPEAKERobviously didn't deliver the thing they promised,
34:45SPEAKERuntested parts.
34:49SPEAKERI feel like weird work stoppages.
34:53SPEAKERAnd every time we dug into one of them,
34:55SPEAKERthere was enough truth there that we said,
34:57SPEAKER"Okay, that, we see what's going on there."
34:59SPEAKERAnd every time I talked to a professional
35:02SPEAKERwho'd been doing this for 20 years,
35:03SPEAKERthey said, "Yeah, that's a thing that really happens,
35:05SPEAKER"but Jesse, all these problems don't happen to the,
35:09SPEAKER"nobody ever has all the problems."
35:11SPEAKER- You won the lottery.
35:14SPEAKER- Until finally we figured out what had been going on.
35:18SPEAKER- What was it?
35:19SPEAKER- The director of, the person who was,
35:23SPEAKERto this time, to our knowledge,
35:24SPEAKERthe director of overseas sales at the factory,
35:28SPEAKERwhen we found out she was no longer
35:29SPEAKERthe director of overseas sales,
35:31SPEAKERshe was a contract salesperson who had one customer, us,
35:36SPEAKERturned out she was a con artist grifter
35:38SPEAKERwho'd been scamming both sides and embezzling money.
35:42SPEAKERShe'd been telling us all the reasons
35:44SPEAKERwhy the factory needed to be paid a little bit early
35:48SPEAKERand sort of bad-mouthing other people at the factory to us,
35:52SPEAKERand she'd been explaining to the factory
35:55SPEAKERthat we were paying a little bit late
35:56SPEAKERand we were a little bit short
35:58SPEAKERbecause we were having a really hard time with sales.
36:02SPEAKER- So this five-finger discount, wow, that's not good.
36:06SPEAKER- Holy crap.
36:08SPEAKERChanged bank accounts, the whole thing,
36:10SPEAKERand when she changed bank accounts on us,
36:12SPEAKERwe emailed the factory owner and said,
36:14SPEAKER"We wanna confirm that this is what's going on,"
36:17SPEAKERand heard back circuitously that, yes, that was right,
36:24SPEAKERwhich he later denied because it, of course, was not right.
36:27SPEAKERIt was, and nobody that we work with in China
36:31SPEAKERbelieved that it was happening because nobody does this,
36:35SPEAKERbecause the penalties are so stiff.
36:38SPEAKERThis was like 10 years to life
36:40SPEAKERin a Chinese prison kind of thing.
36:41SPEAKER- Wow. - Yeah.
36:44SPEAKER- Yeah, and we wrote about all of this pretty extensively
36:47SPEAKERin the background dates for the Model 1.
36:49SPEAKERNone of this is a big reveal here.
36:52SPEAKERYou can read all those updates if you want to.
36:55SPEAKERWe just compiled them into a PDF
36:58SPEAKERthat we don't know what we're gonna do with.
36:59SPEAKERIt's a 472-page book.
37:02SPEAKER- I was gonna say, one of the things that I learned
37:04SPEAKERfrom your Kickstarters is that your,
37:07SPEAKERlike your updates are,
37:10SPEAKERthere's no mystery as to what's going on with the money
37:13SPEAKERthat when I back your Kickstarter,
37:15SPEAKERI know exactly what's going on with my money
37:18SPEAKERand how it's going, because you all didn't,
37:21SPEAKERthere was no varnishing anything
37:23SPEAKERat any point along the way, it seemed like.
37:25SPEAKERI mean, except for the keyboards, of course.
37:27SPEAKER- Yes, the keyboards did get a nice polyurethane coat
37:30SPEAKERon the wood that was mixed
37:33SPEAKERwith what we were initially told was banana oil,
37:36SPEAKERwhich sounded kind of weird until I started Googling
37:39SPEAKERand realized that was not a bad translation,
37:41SPEAKERbut that is in fact the name of,
37:46SPEAKERit actually used to be a shellac
37:47SPEAKERthat got used on the wings of canvas aircraft,
37:51SPEAKERbut it helps dilute, and it helps dilute polyurethane
37:57SPEAKERand allows it to penetrate slightly better into the wood.
38:00SPEAKERAnd I discovered one day when we were modifying
38:02SPEAKERa keyboard enclosure that the room was filled
38:04SPEAKERwith the smell of bananas.
38:07SPEAKERIt doesn't come from bananas,
38:08SPEAKERbut it smells like bananas as I understand it.
38:10SPEAKER- Okay, that makes sense.
38:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:13SPEAKER- Okay, so, okay, so you have keycaps,
38:17SPEAKERyou have a board design theoretically at this point,
38:19SPEAKERyou're manufacturing a board.
38:20SPEAKERI assume that like manufacturing boards
38:22SPEAKERis fairly straightforward.
38:25SPEAKER- You'd think that.
38:29SPEAKERSo we ran in, I mean, so part of it is component selection.
38:33SPEAKERAnd one of the things that you run into pretty,
38:37SPEAKERwhen you're working with the factories,
38:38SPEAKERthey have their recommended vendors,
38:40SPEAKERyou have your preferred vendors.
38:42SPEAKERAnd one of the parts that was a little bit harder to get
38:45SPEAKERwas the Taiwanese LEDs that we'd picked
38:47SPEAKERand the factory sub to Chinese, like with our knowledge,
38:51SPEAKERsub to Chinese LED that was supposed to be compatible.
38:55SPEAKERFriends of mine had used it and said, it's better.
38:57SPEAKERIt's like, it is actually like an improved version
39:00SPEAKERof the thing that we were gonna use,
39:02SPEAKERexcept on our boards, there was an audible whine.
39:07SPEAKERAnd we sort of discovered this, we proved it.
39:13SPEAKERWhen you add more capacitance to the circuit board,
39:16SPEAKERit goes away.
39:17SPEAKERWe had to add approximately one farad of capacitance
39:20SPEAKERbefore it goes away.
39:21SPEAKERThat would be a capacitor about the size of a baby's fist.
39:27SPEAKER- It's a pretty big capacitor for a keyboard.
39:30SPEAKER- It was kind of cool 'cause after you unplug the keyboard
39:32SPEAKERfrom the computer, the LEDs worked for a good 20 seconds.
39:37SPEAKERSo the factory brought in the LED vendor.
39:42SPEAKERThey brought in their design team,
39:43SPEAKERincluding the engineer who had done the silicon inside
39:46SPEAKERthe LEDs and he's like, well, first off,
39:48SPEAKERthis is the old chip inside there and I didn't know
39:51SPEAKERwe were actually selling these to anybody anymore.
39:53SPEAKERBut I think if we did a different wire bond for you
39:56SPEAKERand attached, that might make it go away.
40:01SPEAKERAnd so for an order that was like 200,000 LEDs,
40:04SPEAKERthese LEDs cost less than a dime each.
40:07SPEAKERThey were willing to spin a custom part for us.
40:09SPEAKER- That's amazing.
40:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it didn't work, but it was amazing.
40:13SPEAKER- At least they tried.
40:14SPEAKER- Yeah, the keyboard PCBs in China are a little weird
40:20SPEAKERbecause they're usually pretty big circuit boards
40:23SPEAKERcompared to a lot of others.
40:24SPEAKERAnd so that usually means they're using circuit houses
40:29SPEAKERthat are older process.
40:31SPEAKERSo we showed up with a USB-C connector slightly
40:37SPEAKERbefore that was trendy and other slight small traces
40:42SPEAKERand the factory's normal PCB creation partner
40:49SPEAKERsort of looked and was like, no, we can't do these.
40:52SPEAKERWe can't hit those tolerances.
40:54SPEAKERThe first batch of keyboards that got assembled,
40:57SPEAKERthey were running late and I had delayed my trip home
41:01SPEAKERfrom China and so the factory found another supplier
41:05SPEAKERthat would do the assembly.
41:06SPEAKERThey came back with LEDs at like a funny angle,
41:09SPEAKERdiodes that were missing, but this was like
41:15SPEAKERa small time factory that was just not paying
41:18SPEAKERgood attention.
41:20SPEAKERIt's like, you would think that circuit board assembly
41:22SPEAKERis commodity and it should be, and now it is.
41:25SPEAKERLike we have much better vendors now.
41:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
41:28SPEAKER- We know what to look for.
41:29SPEAKER- Sure, how much time were, how long were each of these
41:33SPEAKERtrips over there and then how many times a year
41:35SPEAKERwere you doing this?
41:35SPEAKERI'm just curious, like what footprint on your life
41:37SPEAKERand your schedule these trips took?
41:40SPEAKER- It varied.
41:42SPEAKERI would never really go for less than 10 days
41:44SPEAKERbecause by the time you're there, it's just not worth it
41:47SPEAKERto like go and come back that fast.
41:49SPEAKERI was usually going three or four times a year.
41:55SPEAKER10 days at the low end and a month at the high end
41:57SPEAKERwhen we were still trying to figure things out.
42:00SPEAKERAnd so when we were just starting to get ready
42:02SPEAKERto do the Atrius with the new factory,
42:05SPEAKERI went and planned a 10-day trip to work through
42:09SPEAKERwhatever were going to be the manufacturing problems.
42:14SPEAKERAnd I get there on a Sunday, go in on Monday morning,
42:18SPEAKERand by Monday at like four, we have knocked off
42:21SPEAKER98% of what needs to happen.
42:24SPEAKER'Cause it turns out that it's not that you need
42:26SPEAKERto spend a month in the factory,
42:28SPEAKERit's that you need to spend time in the factory
42:30SPEAKERwithout the person who's supposed to be your advocate
42:34SPEAKERactively sabotaging you.
42:36SPEAKER- Oh no.
42:38SPEAKER- It's been, it was fascinating to sort of discover
42:40SPEAKERthat it doesn't have to be that painful.
42:45SPEAKERI have not been back to China since,
42:49SPEAKERI can't remember if it was December 2019
42:52SPEAKERor the first week of January 2020,
42:56SPEAKERbut essentially just before no one was gonna travel anymore.
43:01SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say, 'cause the Atrius was,
43:04SPEAKERmanufacturing started right before the pandemic,
43:08SPEAKERis that right?
43:09SPEAKER- Oh no, no, no, no.
43:10SPEAKERWe did the Kickstarter for a,
43:12SPEAKERso the Atrius is an ultra portable 44-key keyboard
43:16SPEAKERthat is perfect to take with you everywhere.
43:19SPEAKERWe launched the campaign in the middle of March of 2020.
43:22SPEAKER- Oh God, okay, that's right.
43:24SPEAKER'Cause I talked to you about it when I saw you in Chicago
43:25SPEAKERin January, I bet.
43:27SPEAKER- Yeah, no, we launched right around
43:31SPEAKERwhen the stay-at-home orders dropped.
43:33SPEAKER- But, so at that point,
43:35SPEAKERhad you done all the pre-production and stuff
43:37SPEAKERon the keyboard?
43:38SPEAKER- So for the Atrius, we had, I had approved,
43:43SPEAKERso I had approved most of the plastics.
43:45SPEAKERWe thought we'd approved the key plates.
43:49SPEAKERWe knew we hadn't figured out
43:51SPEAKERthe key cap labeling solution yet
43:53SPEAKERbecause we wanted black PBT key caps with white letters,
43:56SPEAKERwhich turns out to be hard.
43:59SPEAKERGo figure.
44:00SPEAKERNo, factory didn't know either.
44:03SPEAKERBut like the circuit boards were basically sorted out
44:10SPEAKERand we delivered the early delivery keyboards
44:13SPEAKERpretty much on time.
44:15SPEAKERAnd we delivered the regular keyboards
44:18SPEAKERabout two to three weeks late
44:19SPEAKERbecause even though we'd taken COVID craziness into account,
44:24SPEAKERwe had not taken it enough into account.
44:26SPEAKER- I think you did,
44:28SPEAKERlike if you shipped within a month of your target,
44:30SPEAKERI think you did pretty well given how,
44:33SPEAKERgiven that we had large portions of the country,
44:35SPEAKERcouldn't get toilet paper mid-April last year.
44:37SPEAKERSo yeah.
44:38SPEAKER- We like, we're happy with how we did.
44:44SPEAKERShipping was a nightmare.
44:45SPEAKER- For sure.
44:46SPEAKER- 'Cause most of the cheap carriers,
44:48SPEAKERthe way they work is that they buy cargo space
44:51SPEAKERon commercial flights.
44:53SPEAKERAnd when there are no commercial flights, they don't ship.
44:57SPEAKERSo one of the cheapest options was Singapore posts,
45:02SPEAKERqueue something or other service.
45:04SPEAKERWe had stuff that would get out of Hong Kong
45:07SPEAKERwithin 24 hours, get scanned in in Singapore,
45:10SPEAKERand then sit for six plus weeks
45:12SPEAKERbefore it moved onward from Singapore.
45:15SPEAKER- Wow.
45:17SPEAKEROkay, so how has pandemic stuff affected the new keyboard?
45:21SPEAKERI mean, actually tell me a little bit about the new keyboard.
45:23SPEAKERWe should talk about that while we're in the, yeah.
45:27SPEAKER- Yeah, the new keyboard is the keyboardio model 100.
45:29SPEAKERIf it's not in the show notes and somebody wants to find it,
45:32SPEAKERif they go to shop.keyboard.io,
45:35SPEAKERright now the top hero image is a link to the Kickstarter.
45:39SPEAKERAnd later the top hero image will sell you something
45:42SPEAKERwhenever you're listening to this.
45:44SPEAKERAll right, that's enough commercial spiel for me.
45:46SPEAKERSo we had intended to do this keyboard last year.
45:51SPEAKERI think we'd intended to do it the year before that,
45:54SPEAKERbut everything goes slower in a pandemic.
45:58SPEAKERSo it's an updated version of the model one.
46:02SPEAKERIt is the same butterfly shape.
46:04SPEAKERThe plan is now that instead of everybody getting it
46:07SPEAKERin maple, you get it in your choice of maple or walnut.
46:10SPEAKERAnd there's a fun supply chain issue
46:11SPEAKERwe can talk about there.
46:14SPEAKERWe switched from Matthias Alps switches
46:17SPEAKERto hot swappable MX style switches from Kiwa.
46:21SPEAKERWe were redoing the LEDs and we are in the process
46:25SPEAKERof trying to swap out the main microcontroller
46:28SPEAKERfrom an AVR, the same thing that's in an Arduino Leonardo
46:32SPEAKERto a fancy cortex M4 with,
46:36SPEAKERlooks like it's gonna be a mega flash and 96K of RAM
46:39SPEAKERinstead of, yeah, instead of 32K of flash
46:44SPEAKERand two and a half K of RAM.
46:46SPEAKERAnd it's gonna be cheaper for us to make it that way.
46:49SPEAKER- That's like win-win-win.
46:51SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I mean, the only thing is that
46:53SPEAKERthere is not an Arduino core for this chip right now.
46:56SPEAKERSo that's what we're doing to make sure it works.
47:01SPEAKERAlso, we're in the middle of the chipocalypse.
47:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so explain the chipocalypse.
47:06SPEAKERWe hear, look, we've spent a lot of time in the last year
47:09SPEAKERtalking about hardware shortages,
47:11SPEAKERwhether it's not being able to get video cards
47:14SPEAKERor consoles that like at the high end consumer side,
47:18SPEAKERlike you have a better idea of why that's actually happening
47:21SPEAKERI think than we do.
47:23SPEAKER- I certainly hear, I hear sets of stories
47:27SPEAKERand I have not really paid attention to the early side of it
47:32SPEAKER'cause I am much more in the weeds of
47:36SPEAKERhow do I get my damn chips?
47:38SPEAKERBecause what we're seeing right now,
47:39SPEAKERI mean, things that ordinarily have a six to eight week
47:42SPEAKERor maybe a 13 week lead time,
47:45SPEAKERpeople are talking about 56 and 64 week lead times.
47:49SPEAKER- Wow. - So, oh yeah,
47:50SPEAKERno, a friend of mine got quoted as 62 week lead time
47:53SPEAKERfor a diode last month.
47:55SPEAKER- Wow. - It is clearly
47:56SPEAKERa very special diode, but more than a year.
48:00SPEAKER- It's five years, oh no, 62 weeks, 62 weeks, not months.
48:02SPEAKER- 62 weeks, not 62 months. - Sorry, sorry, sorry.
48:04SPEAKERIt's like five years, what the hell?
48:06SPEAKER- No.
48:08SPEAKER- That's still intense.
48:10SPEAKER- But like chip, and if you can get the chips,
48:13SPEAKERthe prices are through the roof.
48:16SPEAKERChips that, a chip that used to cost a buck something
48:19SPEAKERmight cost four, or a chip that costs three costs 12.
48:25SPEAKER- And these are commodity parts, I'm assuming?
48:26SPEAKER- These are commodity.
48:27SPEAKER- Nothing unusual, right?
48:28SPEAKERNot exotic.
48:31SPEAKER- If something's really exotic, you're probably okay.
48:34SPEAKER- Ah, 'cause there's not as much demand, right.
48:36SPEAKER- I've heard unsourced reports of adversarial hoarding.
48:44SPEAKER- Okay, wow.
48:45SPEAKER- Given how bad availability is right now,
48:47SPEAKERI've heard some reports of people buying up rare chips
48:53SPEAKERthat they know their competitors need,
48:56SPEAKERjust to corner the market.
48:58SPEAKER- Well, so I was gonna say, I heard from a friend
49:01SPEAKERwho shall remain nameless, but works in the space,
49:05SPEAKERthat they've had, they've suspected that that's happening
49:10SPEAKERfor things like specific diodes, and MOSFETs,
49:13SPEAKERand stuff like that.
49:14SPEAKERAnd that it's to the point that they're wondering
49:18SPEAKERif there are vendors that are literally studying
49:22SPEAKERwhat's available and gobbling up availability
49:25SPEAKERspecifically to cause problems for their competitors,
49:28SPEAKERwhich I wouldn't doubt that at this point,
49:31SPEAKERbut yeah, that's bonkers.
49:33SPEAKER- It's crazy, we're in the process of attempting
49:37SPEAKERto pre-buy all of the chips that we believe
49:40SPEAKERare supply constrained that we're gonna need
49:42SPEAKERfor the Model 100, we at least still have the capability
49:45SPEAKERto redesign if we can't get something we need.
49:49SPEAKER- So I was gonna say, are you gonna literally look
49:51SPEAKERat your design, like in this case,
49:54SPEAKERyour design is going to be informed not just by the design
49:57SPEAKERand what's the cheapest, best parts,
49:59SPEAKERbest bang for the buck, but you're also gonna have
50:01SPEAKERto redesign based on what LEDs you can get,
50:03SPEAKERwhat diodes you can get, all that, that's incredible.
50:07SPEAKER- So the LEDs and diodes are a little bit more commodity
50:09SPEAKERand those don't appear to be the things
50:11SPEAKERthat at the scale we work are really a problem right now,
50:17SPEAKERnot compared to ICs.
50:19SPEAKER- Okay.
50:20SPEAKER- So like the one that I'm--
50:22SPEAKER- Integrated circuits for people.
50:23SPEAKER- It's like the chips, the actual chips.
50:27SPEAKERWhat I get called jelly beans, like this,
50:29SPEAKERit doesn't really matter who you get them from,
50:31SPEAKERlike the diodes and the resistors and the capacitors,
50:34SPEAKERthat stuff doesn't seem to be as bad right now,
50:38SPEAKERbut like the controller for our LEDs,
50:41SPEAKERthe chip we use to let the two halves of the Model 100
50:45SPEAKERtalk to each other, that seems to be through the roof
50:48SPEAKERand to have some availability issues
50:50SPEAKERand so I'm waiting for this quotation from our factory
50:54SPEAKERfor what their vendors have told them is available.
50:57SPEAKERSo it's a differential I squared C transceiver.
51:01SPEAKERSo it takes a signal that is usually on two wires
51:05SPEAKERand runs it over two pairs of wires
51:07SPEAKERfor the interconnect between the two hands
51:09SPEAKERto allow it to run over greater distances
51:12SPEAKERand to be more immune to noise.
51:14SPEAKEROne of our competitors doesn't do this
51:16SPEAKERand if you put your cell phone
51:17SPEAKERin the middle of their keyboard and it rings,
51:20SPEAKERyou lose the right half of the keyboard.
51:21SPEAKER- Good boy.
51:24SPEAKER- But I approached one of our vendors about,
51:27SPEAKERdo you have something on your rate card
51:30SPEAKERor on your line card from somebody you represent
51:33SPEAKERthat I could replace this chip with
51:36SPEAKERand they got back to me today saying,
51:38SPEAKERwell, there's this FPGA vendor in China we work with
51:41SPEAKERwho would be willing to do the custom firmware in-house
51:45SPEAKERand we could just replace this chip
51:46SPEAKERwith a custom programmed FPGA.
51:49SPEAKER- That's ridiculous on each side.
51:52SPEAKER- And it's price competitive.
51:54SPEAKER- Wow.
51:55SPEAKER- I thought I was waiting for the part
51:56SPEAKERwhere you said it was gonna cost like 50 times as much.
51:59SPEAKER- No, it's gonna, so it's gonna cost,
52:03SPEAKERI wanna say like 10% more than it would have cost
52:06SPEAKERin a normal year.
52:06SPEAKER- Wow, wow, wow.
52:08SPEAKER- But that falls like,
52:12SPEAKERthat may run a foul of Cegalski's law.
52:15SPEAKERIf you know Maciej who runs Pinboard,
52:17SPEAKERhe has this famous saying about technology,
52:19SPEAKERif I'm excited about it, it doesn't belong in production.
52:24SPEAKERAnd like a novel firmware on an FPGA to replace a chip.
52:30SPEAKERWe're trying to ship early delivery units in November
52:34SPEAKERand mass production in January.
52:37SPEAKERAh, I'm willing to pay a little bit more money right now
52:40SPEAKERto have something stable.
52:41SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's like keyboard's not a place
52:44SPEAKERthat I wanna have a lot of experimentation.
52:45SPEAKERLike I want the areas where the experimentation
52:48SPEAKERhappens to be well-defined and established
52:51SPEAKERand not be surprises.
52:52SPEAKERAlthough, I mean, it does seem like it would be cool
52:54SPEAKERto run like an 8088 simulator on your FPGA in the keyboard.
53:01SPEAKER- We actually have a friend, Piotr Esdentipinski,
53:05SPEAKERwho's, he's one bit squared, is his company.
53:08SPEAKERThey started off making like little Arduino programmable
53:12SPEAKERUAVs and he's doing a lot of open source FPGA work.
53:17SPEAKERHe just did a version of our Atrius that fit,
53:20SPEAKERthat is compatible with our plate and our enclosure
53:23SPEAKERthat is entirely built in an FPGA.
53:27SPEAKERAnd so it's like, it's super cool, it's super efficient.
53:31SPEAKERI'm personally still unconvinced that it is worth
53:35SPEAKERdoing for most people, but it's real cool.
53:39SPEAKER- I mean, look, if we, everything starts, it turns out,
53:42SPEAKERwith you wanting to make something cool for yourself, right?
53:46SPEAKER- Absolutely, and like he makes FPGA stuff.
53:48SPEAKERBeing able to use the FPGA stuff for real use
53:51SPEAKERwould make tons of sense.
53:52SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it's like the old, yeah,
53:54SPEAKERif the only tool you have is a hammer,
53:56SPEAKEReverything starts looking like a nail.
53:57SPEAKERIf you know, once you know how to program FPGAs,
53:59SPEAKEReverything looks like it's an FPGA problem.
54:00SPEAKER- So yeah, so if your listeners aren't familiar with FPGAs,
54:04SPEAKERthey basically let you do hardware and software.
54:06SPEAKER- So yeah, you can reprogram a chip on the fly
54:08SPEAKERto perform. - To be any other chip
54:10SPEAKERthat'll fit into the logic gates, right?
54:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so like you can now get a RISC-V,
54:15SPEAKERan open source RISC-V CPU core for an FPGA.
54:20SPEAKER- We've talked a lot about FPGA applications here
54:23SPEAKERin the past, we haven't talked about it.
54:24SPEAKER- Oh, awesome.
54:25SPEAKER- Big Mr. Fans around here,
54:26SPEAKERif you're familiar with that project.
54:28SPEAKER- So, okay, so the keyboard's in process.
54:31SPEAKERThe Kickstarter has like a week left.
54:34SPEAKERLike you have new factories online,
54:38SPEAKERyou don't have the bad actor in between you
54:40SPEAKERand the people doing the work.
54:42SPEAKER- I'm sorry, maybe we shouldn't delve
54:45SPEAKERinto this particular rabbit hole.
54:46SPEAKERDid this person, do you know what their ultimate fate was?
54:50SPEAKERDid they end up in prison?
54:52SPEAKERMaybe we shouldn't talk about it.
54:54SPEAKER- So I will be slightly circumspect,
54:58SPEAKERbut what I will say is that we have
55:01SPEAKERa very good Chinese lawyer in China.
55:05SPEAKERShe ended up convincing the factory
55:07SPEAKERto take responsibility for the actions
55:10SPEAKERof their then former salesperson.
55:16SPEAKERAnd they did end up reneging on those commitments
55:20SPEAKERthat they had made in writing with the Chinese contract.
55:23SPEAKERAnd so we ended up having to pursue them
55:27SPEAKERthrough the Chinese legal system.
55:30SPEAKERThe Chinese legal system did work on our behalf
55:32SPEAKERand a judge ordered them to return our tooling
55:35SPEAKERand to return product they had made for us
55:40SPEAKERthat we had paid for.
55:42SPEAKERThey did not return our time, they did not return our money.
55:47SPEAKERBut we ended up agreeing with our lawyer's estimation
55:52SPEAKERthat it made more sense to go after the factory
55:56SPEAKERthan to go after their salesperson.
55:57SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, that makes sense.
56:02SPEAKERThis is still a horrific for the first product out there.
56:08SPEAKER- I mean, nowhere to go but up from there.
56:09SPEAKER- Yeah, what a way to start, Jesse.
56:11SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it was quite an experience, but.
56:16SPEAKER- Can we talk about RGB a little bit?
56:17SPEAKER'Cause this is a thing that's become popular
56:20SPEAKERover the recent years.
56:24SPEAKERHow much complication does that add to the design
56:29SPEAKERand how, I mean, there's different scales
56:32SPEAKERof lights on a keyboard, right?
56:34SPEAKERThere's, hey, we have fixed color lights
56:36SPEAKERunderneath the keys.
56:38SPEAKERThat's pretty straightforward.
56:39SPEAKERWe have RGB lights we can program
56:42SPEAKERwhen you write firmware to the keyboard
56:44SPEAKERwhich is more complicated
56:46SPEAKERbut still reasonably straightforward.
56:49SPEAKERAnd then we have like crazy gaming keyboards
56:51SPEAKERwhere when you fire up Overwatch
56:54SPEAKERand you switch characters, the layout,
56:55SPEAKERthe lighting layout changes to match the keys
56:58SPEAKERthat you use for that particular character.
57:01SPEAKERAnd I'm curious like what the difficulty curve is
57:03SPEAKERon your side for the different layers there.
57:06SPEAKER- So there's one in the middle
57:08SPEAKERthat you may not have been aware of
57:11SPEAKERand I'll go through that.
57:12SPEAKERSo single color LEDs, especially if you don't need
57:16SPEAKERto toggle them on and off individually, very easy.
57:20SPEAKERBy the time you need to toggle them on,
57:21SPEAKERby the time you wanna be able to control each one,
57:25SPEAKERthat means you need some kind of LED driver
57:28SPEAKERor to have LEDs that have a smart driver inside them
57:31SPEAKERlike what Adafruit sells as NeoPixels or DotStars.
57:35SPEAKER- Got it.
57:36SPEAKER- And so those are very popular in the hobbyist world
57:41SPEAKERbecause the board layout is very simple.
57:44SPEAKERYou basically have a chain of,
57:46SPEAKERyou have a strip or a chain of LEDs.
57:49SPEAKER- These are the ones where you load up the packet
57:51SPEAKERwith the commands for all the LEDs
57:53SPEAKERand each one chunks off one command
57:55SPEAKERand passes it on the next one.
57:56SPEAKER- Yes, exactly.
57:57SPEAKERIt's you basically spew it.
58:01SPEAKEREach LED gets three or four bytes of information
58:04SPEAKERand then yeah, cuts the head off the data
58:08SPEAKERand passes the rest onward.
58:09SPEAKERAnd so that is--
58:10SPEAKER- They generate a lot of heat though
58:11SPEAKERand use a lot of power, right?
58:12SPEAKER- They were designed for architectural use.
58:15SPEAKERThey, I mean, you can get them in different form factors now
58:18SPEAKERthat have different power profiles,
58:21SPEAKERbut yeah, we used those in the Model 1
58:25SPEAKERand we programmatically limited it
58:28SPEAKERand physically limited it to being able to draw 1.6 amps,
58:32SPEAKERwhich is about what you can expect out of a laptop
58:35SPEAKERthat's willing to give you a lot of power out of a USB port.
58:39SPEAKERThe USB spec says you're only supposed to ask
58:41SPEAKERfor half an amp traditionally.
58:44SPEAKER1.6 is what a MacBook or a ThinkPad will give you
58:47SPEAKERbefore it starts to wonder if something is shorting out.
58:51SPEAKERIf we drove the 64 LEDs in the Model 1
58:55SPEAKERat full brightness with no limit,
58:58SPEAKERwe would be looking at pulling four amps of power.
59:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:03SPEAKER- And so for the Model 100,
59:05SPEAKERwhat we're doing is using dumb LEDs,
59:09SPEAKERlike they have an R pixel, a G pixel, and a B pixel,
59:13SPEAKERa red, a green, and a blue,
59:15SPEAKERand the pins are a current source
59:18SPEAKERand then syncs for those three pixels.
59:21SPEAKERAnd so you need to have a separate external controller.
59:23SPEAKERAnd so we can get the same kind of brightness
59:25SPEAKERthat we got out of the Model 1,
59:27SPEAKERbut with less than a third of the power.
59:31SPEAKERThey do require a driver chip of some kind,
59:35SPEAKERand so that we then talk to over I squared.
59:39SPEAKERActually, that might be,
59:43SPEAKERI don't remember what we talked to it over,
59:45SPEAKERbut it's basically, we program it directly
59:50SPEAKERand it then deals with lighting up the right pixels.
59:55SPEAKERSo it's a little more complicated to lay out.
1:00:00SPEAKERIt is harder to do as a hobbyist
1:00:02SPEAKERbecause you have a bunch more fine pitch pins.
1:00:05SPEAKERIt's not dramatically more complicated,
1:00:08SPEAKERbut it is a little bit harder to write to.
1:00:11SPEAKER- Does it make the board,
1:00:12SPEAKERdo you have to do more layers on the board
1:00:14SPEAKERor anything like that, or is it still--
1:00:15SPEAKER- No, we still only do two-layer boards.
1:00:19SPEAKERWe did have, we once had a manufacturing engineer
1:00:21SPEAKERat a large consumer electronics company
1:00:24SPEAKERlook at our board and say,
1:00:26SPEAKER"You know, you could make these one-layer boards
1:00:28SPEAKER"with some carbon trace printing on the other side.
1:00:32SPEAKER"It would save you 10%.
1:00:35SPEAKER"How much are they gonna be if we don't do that?
1:00:37SPEAKER"A buck."
1:00:40SPEAKERAnd it's like, but that is kind of the specialist technique
1:00:45SPEAKERthat it doesn't make any sense at our volume.
1:00:47SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:00:48SPEAKER- But I've still only ever designed two-layer boards.
1:00:52SPEAKERSo because chips are starting to get scarce,
1:00:56SPEAKERI did ask our factory what microcontrollers
1:01:00SPEAKERthey're using for their keyboards,
1:01:02SPEAKERfor their clients using for their fancy keyboards.
1:01:05SPEAKERAnd they handed me a Chinese data sheet
1:01:09SPEAKERfor something that speaks USB head profiles on one end
1:01:14SPEAKERand actually has key matrix scanning
1:01:17SPEAKERand built into the same chip
1:01:20SPEAKERand also has LED matrix driving
1:01:23SPEAKERwith a dozen optional LED effects burned in to the ROM.
1:01:29SPEAKERYou don't get to choose which LED effects
1:01:32SPEAKERyou get past which one of these you wanna enable.
1:01:35SPEAKER- You can have the waterfall or the rainbow, okay?
1:01:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you can have the rainbow left and right.
1:01:39SPEAKERI think you might be able to change the speed of the rainbow.
1:01:41SPEAKER- Okay.
1:01:42SPEAKER- But the things we want are the ability for users
1:01:46SPEAKERto write their own LED effects
1:01:48SPEAKERor to be able to drive the LED effects
1:01:52SPEAKERover a serial protocol, which is a thing
1:01:55SPEAKERthat we and most other hackers, firmers offer these days.
1:01:59SPEAKERThe gaming companies are getting a little more open
1:02:01SPEAKERwith their protocols, but it is all still around like,
1:02:04SPEAKERhere, yes, this is how you write to our protocol
1:02:06SPEAKERso that you can drive our keyboards.
1:02:08SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a co-marketing money thing a lot of times.
1:02:10SPEAKERSo it turns out the Razer people only want
1:02:13SPEAKERthe Razer keyboards to work with the Razer thing
1:02:16SPEAKERthat they paid to develop anyway.
1:02:17SPEAKER- Yes, no, we actually talked to them very early on
1:02:20SPEAKERabout whether we could get access to Razer switches.
1:02:22SPEAKERThey had us sign some agreements
1:02:25SPEAKERand then they just kind of ghosted.
1:02:28SPEAKERBut that was a long, long time ago.
1:02:29SPEAKER- Yeah, but the upshot is the,
1:02:33SPEAKERbut now you have serial communications
1:02:36SPEAKERso that you can control the lights dynamically
1:02:38SPEAKERusing your software or something.
1:02:40SPEAKER- Yeah, control the lights, change the layout on the fly,
1:02:48SPEAKERdo other crazy things you want to do.
1:02:53SPEAKER- I always wonder, I'm the worst in the world
1:02:55SPEAKERabout layout changes on keyboards.
1:02:57SPEAKERI just use one layout no matter what
1:03:00SPEAKER'cause my brain is not plastic enough
1:03:02SPEAKERto change layouts on the fly anymore.
1:03:05SPEAKER- But, and just to see, so what we're talking about
1:03:09SPEAKERwhen we're talking about changing layouts
1:03:10SPEAKERis for example on the Atrius, if you want to use a numpad,
1:03:14SPEAKERthen you can go down a layer and the right-hand side
1:03:16SPEAKERof the keyboard will be a numpad at that point.
1:03:19SPEAKER- It's like you can write your own function key
1:03:22SPEAKERthat changes the behavior of any of the other keys.
1:03:24SPEAKERSo you can write your own shift key or you can write macros
1:03:28SPEAKERor you can make a key that is sticky when you double tap it
1:03:33SPEAKERor you can write a key that will strafe in your game
1:03:39SPEAKERbut do it with enough randomness
1:03:42SPEAKERthat the anti-cheating protections don't kick in.
1:03:45SPEAKER- No, no, no, we don't like those.
1:03:46SPEAKER- We do not recommend this and we believe it
1:03:51SPEAKERto be somewhat immoral but we know that there are a lot
1:03:53SPEAKERof folks out there who are immoral.
1:03:54SPEAKER- But also-- - Great power,
1:03:55SPEAKERgreat responsibility.
1:03:57SPEAKER- But also like some people have different keyboard layouts
1:04:00SPEAKERfor when they're writing, if they write a lot of code,
1:04:03SPEAKERif they're writing JavaScript or something,
1:04:04SPEAKERthen they'll have a JavaScript layout that puts the keys
1:04:07SPEAKERthat you constantly hit when you're writing JavaScript
1:04:11SPEAKERsomeplace where they're easily accessible
1:04:12SPEAKERand they'll switch back to a more standard QWERTY-like
1:04:15SPEAKERwhen they're doing word writing and stuff like that.
1:04:18SPEAKERSo it is a power user feature for power users, I would say.
1:04:22SPEAKER- Absolutely, or you learn to type in Dvorak or you...
1:04:30SPEAKER- One of the power user things that I've never managed
1:04:33SPEAKERto wrap my brain around but some people absolutely love
1:04:36SPEAKERis putting your numbers on the home row.
1:04:39SPEAKER- Oh, huh.
1:04:40SPEAKER- So like you don't have to reach,
1:04:41SPEAKERyou just do something with your thumb.
1:04:46SPEAKER- Wow.
1:04:47SPEAKER- One of the actual useful things that we did
1:04:49SPEAKERwith this super programmability for a customer
1:04:51SPEAKERwho had Decorvene syndrome and it had hand surgery
1:04:56SPEAKERis he wrote to us and he's like, what do you recommend
1:04:59SPEAKERwhile I can only use my left hand
1:05:00SPEAKERand I've got to get work done?
1:05:02SPEAKERAnd so we implemented Edgar Matej's half QWERTY
1:05:06SPEAKERusing the Model 1's palm key where when you drop your palm
1:05:11SPEAKERonto that other button, it makes the keyboard a mirror
1:05:13SPEAKERof what the other hand would be.
1:05:15SPEAKER- I was gonna say, one of my friends in college
1:05:20SPEAKERhad one hand and he did the same thing with a...
1:05:24SPEAKERI don't know if you remember, but I remember those keyboards
1:05:25SPEAKERthat you put your fingers in the holes and...
1:05:28SPEAKER- Oh, a data hand.
1:05:29SPEAKER- A data hand, yeah, exactly.
1:05:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I've got one of those back there.
1:05:32SPEAKER- Oh, I know, I know.
1:05:33SPEAKERI know about you and the keyboards, Jesse.
1:05:35SPEAKER- I think Marcin has more keyboards than me now.
1:05:37SPEAKER- Look, Marcin's writing a book.
1:05:39SPEAKERHe should have more.
1:05:40SPEAKERWe still need to have Marcin on the show to talk about.
1:05:41SPEAKER- You should have Marcin on the show, absolutely.
1:05:44SPEAKER- I think, I mean, I feel like we've kind of glossed over
1:05:47SPEAKERa lot of stuff here.
1:05:48SPEAKERIt's really complicated.
1:05:49SPEAKER(laughing)
1:05:50SPEAKERIt's the most, probably the biggest understatement
1:05:54SPEAKERI've ever made on the show to date, but I don't know.
1:05:57SPEAKERBrad, what do you, do you feel like,
1:05:59SPEAKERwe haven't talked about lumber at all, which is...
1:06:02SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:06:03SPEAKER- Like you do a gorgeous wooden case for these keyboards.
1:06:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:06:07SPEAKER- And I know it has to be just like an absolute boondoggle
1:06:13SPEAKERfrom a manufacturing standpoint,
1:06:15SPEAKERbut I'm so happy that you do them.
1:06:18SPEAKER- So yeah, so the first time around,
1:06:20SPEAKERwhen we spec'd this on Kickstarter,
1:06:22SPEAKERwhen we didn't really know how many we were gonna make,
1:06:24SPEAKERwe do care about not doing horrible things to the world,
1:06:30SPEAKERand we spec'd Canadian maple,
1:06:32SPEAKERwhich basically grows like a weed.
1:06:35SPEAKERAnd then we ended up manufacturing in Southern China.
1:06:37SPEAKERAnd so when you mill a keyboard enclosure
1:06:42SPEAKERout of Canadian maple in Southern China,
1:06:45SPEAKERit has to be shipped from North America.
1:06:48SPEAKER- So you're shipping both ways now.
1:06:51SPEAKER- Shipping both ways.
1:06:52SPEAKERAnd then for the Model 100,
1:06:54SPEAKERwe're giving folks the choice of maple or walnut.
1:06:57SPEAKERAnd we hit up our wood vendor
1:06:59SPEAKERto get a quote just before the campaign
1:07:01SPEAKERto make sure we knew what our numbers looked like.
1:07:04SPEAKERAnd he warned us that yes, prices have gone up,
1:07:06SPEAKERbut also right now they can't get solid boards
1:07:10SPEAKERin maple or walnut that are wide enough,
1:07:13SPEAKERbecause their importer's supply of maple
1:07:18SPEAKERand walnut boards is sitting on the docks at origin.
1:07:21SPEAKERNow, because of the global container shortage,
1:07:24SPEAKERwhich I'm not 100% sure I believe,
1:07:27SPEAKERbecause there's still plenty of stuff
1:07:29SPEAKERbeing shipped out from China.
1:07:32SPEAKERAnd so going back to China shouldn't be too bad.
1:07:35SPEAKERI asked them if they could tell us
1:07:37SPEAKERwhere the walnut was coming from
1:07:38SPEAKERso I could try and understand what's going on.
1:07:42SPEAKERAnd so they sent us a bill of lading from the last order.
1:07:46SPEAKERSo that walnut is being felled in Kentucky.
1:07:50SPEAKERAnd as far as I can tell,
1:07:51SPEAKERis sitting on the docks in Virginia Beach.
1:07:56SPEAKER- Wow. - Waiting to go to China.
1:07:59SPEAKER- Wow, that's the long way around, I guess.
1:08:02SPEAKER- I mean like, yeah, I mean,
1:08:04SPEAKERI kind of assumed it's coming out of Port of Oakland
1:08:07SPEAKERor Port of LA or something like that, but nope.
1:08:12SPEAKERThey're working it through for us.
1:08:14SPEAKERThey offered us joined walnut and they did some samples,
1:08:18SPEAKERlike well, basically like butcher block style.
1:08:21SPEAKERAnd I said, no, our customers won't take that.
1:08:22SPEAKERAnd they said, let's make some samples
1:08:25SPEAKERand then we can see if it looks good.
1:08:27SPEAKERAnd three nights ago, I got a WeChat message
1:08:29SPEAKERfrom our wood guy with a series of six photos
1:08:33SPEAKERin rapid succession and then two giant crying emoji.
1:08:39SPEAKERAnd I'm like, yeah, that's not gonna work.
1:08:40SPEAKERHe's like, there's a reason I sent you pictures
1:08:42SPEAKERand didn't FedEx it.
1:08:45SPEAKERAs soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn't gonna work.
1:08:47SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, at least you have a partner there
1:08:50SPEAKERthat like knows what you're looking for
1:08:52SPEAKERand stuff like that at this point, right?
1:08:54SPEAKER- Yeah, we've got a bunch of partners and suppliers
1:08:57SPEAKERwho I trust to be operating in their own interests
1:09:01SPEAKERand transparent with me about it.
1:09:03SPEAKER- So when you're manufacturing,
1:09:05SPEAKERso you collect all the parts,
1:09:08SPEAKERyou know what's gonna go into this.
1:09:10SPEAKERYou send them all to one factory
1:09:12SPEAKERand then the line fires up when everything arrives.
1:09:14SPEAKERIs that how it works?
1:09:15SPEAKER- So that's called consignment.
1:09:17SPEAKERAnd so that would be like where,
1:09:19SPEAKERand there are some Western companies that do it this way.
1:09:22SPEAKERThey don't want the factory to be able to run a ghost shift
1:09:25SPEAKERand make more of their thing.
1:09:27SPEAKER- Okay.
1:09:28SPEAKER- Honestly, for anything at the complexity level
1:09:31SPEAKERwe're making, if somebody in China wanted to clone
1:09:34SPEAKERour product, what they'd have to do is buy one.
1:09:37SPEAKER- Okay.
1:09:38SPEAKER- And I do actually believe that imitation
1:09:43SPEAKERis the sincerest form of flattery.
1:09:45SPEAKERSomebody who's going to clone our product
1:09:47SPEAKERisn't going to clone what makes them good.
1:09:50SPEAKERThey're going to clone what they look like.
1:09:52SPEAKERAnd so in general, we would rather allow our factory
1:09:59SPEAKERto be on the hook for sourcing most of what we need.
1:10:03SPEAKERThere's some things where we do consign them.
1:10:06SPEAKERSo the wood, because keyboard factories
1:10:09SPEAKERdon't know much about wood,
1:10:10SPEAKERwe typically consign the wood though we don't,
1:10:15SPEAKERwe allow them, or we beg the vendors
1:10:18SPEAKERto work directly together to do the,
1:10:21SPEAKERto make sure things get to the right place
1:10:23SPEAKERand to deal with problems with parts
1:10:26SPEAKERand schedules and things like that.
1:10:28SPEAKERThe travel cases we sourced on our own
1:10:32SPEAKERbecause we did them at a time when we weren't
1:10:33SPEAKERreally working directly with the factory.
1:10:38SPEAKEROur Chinese PM is currently working,
1:10:42SPEAKERhas a vendor he really likes for packaging
1:10:44SPEAKERand so he is going to have us consign our packaging
1:10:48SPEAKERto the factory, even though our factory's
1:10:51SPEAKERpackaging folks are just fine.
1:10:54SPEAKERI'm trying to think what else we can sign.
1:10:58SPEAKERNot much, like I would, so this is what gets called,
1:11:02SPEAKERit's more what gets called contract manufacturing.
1:11:04SPEAKER- So you just say, hey, here are the parts,
1:11:06SPEAKERwe need these parts and we need them here.
1:11:08SPEAKERYou guys deal with all this side of it
1:11:10SPEAKERand we just want to see the finished product basically.
1:11:12SPEAKER- We need parts that meet these specs.
1:11:14SPEAKERSometimes we will appoint a specific manufacturer
1:11:18SPEAKERor supplier, we'll say, you can buy these parts
1:11:21SPEAKERbut you have to buy them from this person.
1:11:23SPEAKER- Okay.
1:11:24SPEAKER- When we consign parts, they show up
1:11:28SPEAKERon the bill of materials outside the line item
1:11:32SPEAKERwhere the factory has added their profit.
1:11:36SPEAKERThe factory, a good bill of materials from a factory
1:11:39SPEAKERshould show you what they're paying for each thing
1:11:42SPEAKERand then what their markup is,
1:11:44SPEAKERlike what profit they're taking on everything.
1:11:47SPEAKERAnd they don't generally, they're not generally
1:11:50SPEAKERsupposed to be adding that markup if you are,
1:11:53SPEAKERI mean, they can't do it if you're paying for the parts.
1:11:57SPEAKER- I mean, that makes sense, yeah.
1:11:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it makes tons of sense.
1:12:00SPEAKERBut like our old factory or old salesperson
1:12:02SPEAKERtried very hard to scuttle any time that we were going to.
1:12:08SPEAKERYeah.
1:12:09SPEAKER- So is there anything that's been easier this go round
1:12:14SPEAKERthan it was with the Atrius or with the Model 1?
1:12:15SPEAKERI mean, it seems like everything has been,
1:12:17SPEAKERyou've learned something every time it sounds like.
1:12:19SPEAKER- So a lot of it is, I mean, the actual flow
1:12:23SPEAKERis a lot easier than with the Model 1
1:12:24SPEAKERbecause we already have a factory that we know and trust
1:12:28SPEAKERand who actually took custody of the Model 1 tooling.
1:12:30SPEAKERSo we didn't have to start totally from scratch.
1:12:33SPEAKERWe could, they modified some of the tooling
1:12:35SPEAKERrather than making it from the beginning.
1:12:39SPEAKERA lot of the aspects of the designer already constrained.
1:12:44SPEAKERWe're setting ourselves up a little bit of difficulty
1:12:47SPEAKERswitching from an AVR to a Cortex-M4
1:12:50SPEAKERthat we need to write code for, but that's just code.
1:12:54SPEAKERThe supply chain stuff is absolutely bonkers this time.
1:12:57SPEAKERGetting parts was not a problem in previous iterations.
1:13:02SPEAKER- The before times.
1:13:03SPEAKER- Yeah, the before times.
1:13:05SPEAKERHopefully the future times, but that may,
1:13:07SPEAKEReverything we're hearing is that
1:13:08SPEAKERthis is gonna run another year.
1:13:10SPEAKER- I mean, the thing that-- - The Chimpocalypse.
1:13:12SPEAKER- The thing that I've always heard
1:13:14SPEAKERis that it's always easier to turn stuff off than on
1:13:16SPEAKERand that when you turn things back on again,
1:13:18SPEAKERyou can expect anywhere from 24 to 48 months of disruption,
1:13:25SPEAKERdepending on how deep up the line the disruption started.
1:13:32SPEAKERBut they don't start manufacturing
1:13:33SPEAKERuntil everything's there, obviously,
1:13:34SPEAKER'cause once the line's going,
1:13:35SPEAKERyou don't wanna stop the line.
1:13:36SPEAKER- So with smaller production runs,
1:13:40SPEAKERit's a little different.
1:13:42SPEAKER'Cause our entire, they'll do a pilot run,
1:13:45SPEAKERwhich is probably gonna be about 100 units.
1:13:46SPEAKERIt's what we sold on Kickstarter,
1:13:48SPEAKERis the early delivery units.
1:13:51SPEAKERAnd so based on that, we may make some small changes.
1:13:55SPEAKERThey will refine the assembly process.
1:13:58SPEAKERAnd then when they do mass production,
1:14:02SPEAKERthey would obviously rather have everything come in
1:14:06SPEAKERthree days before they start doing final assembly.
1:14:11SPEAKERIn reality, some stuff may show up much earlier
1:14:14SPEAKERand stuff may accrete.
1:14:17SPEAKERWe're right now talking about buying chips
1:14:19SPEAKERsix months, five months before we would be using them,
1:14:23SPEAKERwhich in the before times was unheard of.
1:14:27SPEAKER- But now it seems to look like it makes good sense
1:14:29SPEAKERbecause of the Chimpocalypse.
1:14:30SPEAKER- All of the electrical designers who do small electronics
1:14:37SPEAKERthat I talked to, and actually folks who work
1:14:39SPEAKERfor a fruit company in Cupertino we've talked to,
1:14:41SPEAKERhave basically been saying,
1:14:42SPEAKER"We've been pre-buying a year's worth of electronics."
1:14:46SPEAKERAnd so a lot of it they can do pretty quickly
1:14:51SPEAKERbecause our assembly factory,
1:14:53SPEAKERtheir specialty is both assembly and injection molding.
1:14:57SPEAKERSo they can just kick that out relatively quickly
1:15:00SPEAKERonce everything is signed off on.
1:15:03SPEAKER- So what happens once the Kickstarter's done, Jesse?
1:15:07SPEAKERWill you continue making the Model 100?
1:15:11SPEAKEROr is it gonna be an ongoing production of this?
1:15:15SPEAKEROr is this something that you're gonna do in batches or TBD?
1:15:18SPEAKER- Our goal is to have products in stock for people to buy.
1:15:20SPEAKERWe are a small company
1:15:22SPEAKERand we have a very weird business model.
1:15:24SPEAKERWe sell products to consumers for cash money,
1:15:29SPEAKERfor fiat currency, for more than it costs us to make them.
1:15:33SPEAKER- Wow, that's fascinating.
1:15:34SPEAKER- Radically innovative.
1:15:36SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.
1:15:37SPEAKERShould patent that business model.
1:15:38SPEAKER- Your user acquisition process is just to make something
1:15:41SPEAKERgood that people want to spend money on?
1:15:43SPEAKER- Our user acquisition processes primarily make something
1:15:46SPEAKERso good that people want to spend money on it
1:15:48SPEAKERand tell their friends about how much they love it.
1:15:51SPEAKERWe have been flirting with small amounts of advertising,
1:15:54SPEAKERbut it is nowhere near as good
1:15:55SPEAKERas our word of mouth conversion.
1:15:58SPEAKER- Beautiful.
1:15:59SPEAKER- Rad, you got anything else?
1:16:00SPEAKERI think I'm probably wrapped up.
1:16:02SPEAKER- I think you kind of touched on this a minute ago.
1:16:04SPEAKERThe only question I had from like practically
1:16:05SPEAKERthe beginning of the episode was,
1:16:07SPEAKERyou talked about like somebody hitting you up for the foot
1:16:09SPEAKERon a keyboard that they want a replacement for.
1:16:11SPEAKERAnd you're like, you know, we can't just,
1:16:12SPEAKERwe don't just have a bin of those.
1:16:14SPEAKERYou know, they were made special out of a mold.
1:16:16SPEAKER- We should have had a bin.
1:16:18SPEAKER- Hindsight is 20/20, but the question I have is like,
1:16:20SPEAKERso you set up your custom production lines,
1:16:22SPEAKERthe molds are made.
1:16:24SPEAKERIf you're not making, you know,
1:16:25SPEAKERif those lines are not running forever,
1:16:26SPEAKERobviously they're gonna get dismantled
1:16:27SPEAKERand other products will be made in their place.
1:16:29SPEAKERBut do you keep those molds?
1:16:30SPEAKERDo they get mothballed?
1:16:32SPEAKERSo you could make more of those products
1:16:33SPEAKERin the future if you needed to,
1:16:34SPEAKERor does those get broken down and reused or?
1:16:37SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the factory is supposed to,
1:16:39SPEAKERI mean, we own them and they're in the factory's custody
1:16:42SPEAKERand the factory is supposed to maintain them
1:16:43SPEAKERin working order for us.
1:16:44SPEAKER- Okay.
1:16:45SPEAKER- And so for the Atrius,
1:16:47SPEAKERwe've actually done a couple of production runs.
1:16:49SPEAKERAnd so when we want more, they mount them,
1:16:52SPEAKERyou know, they have a giant chain lift running,
1:16:56SPEAKERyou know, running through the warehouse
1:16:57SPEAKERand they attach a chain to the tool that they want
1:17:01SPEAKERand they hoist it up and bring it over to the mold
1:17:04SPEAKERand slam it in place and then they make more.
1:17:08SPEAKERAnd the usual guidance that we get
1:17:11SPEAKERis that they really don't wanna put the tooling on the mold
1:17:14SPEAKERfor less than a day.
1:17:15SPEAKERAnd so that's probably like at least a thousand shots.
1:17:20SPEAKER- So basically that timing is what determines
1:17:22SPEAKERhow your minimum order for theoretically, at least.
1:17:27SPEAKER- Well, either your minimum order
1:17:28SPEAKERor the minimum cost for your order.
1:17:31SPEAKERLike they'll make me one,
1:17:34SPEAKERbut they're not gonna be happy about it
1:17:35SPEAKERand they're going to charge me as if they made me hundreds.
1:17:38SPEAKER- Okay, got it.
1:17:39SPEAKER- So they may as well make me the hundreds.
1:17:41SPEAKER- Yeah, makes sense.
1:17:44SPEAKERCool, I mean, this has been fabulous, Jesse.
1:17:46SPEAKERThank you, thank you so, so much.
1:17:48SPEAKERIf people wanna find out about the model 100 or Cubordio,
1:17:50SPEAKERwhat's the best place for them to go?
1:17:52SPEAKER- Shop.keyboard.io certainly works.
1:17:54SPEAKERWe are @keyboardio on Twitter.
1:17:57SPEAKERWe are not very good at Facebook
1:17:59SPEAKERand we are too old to be any good at all at TikTok.
1:18:04SPEAKER- I feel like, look,
1:18:06SPEAKERI would watch some injection molding TikToks all day long.
1:18:08SPEAKERI'm not gonna lie. - It's an untapped market.
1:18:10SPEAKER- We absolutely should.
1:18:11SPEAKERI mean, so what's funny is like one of our vendors
1:18:15SPEAKERsaw our video on Duyen, the Chinese version of TikTok.
1:18:19SPEAKERLike there is a, it looks like a Chinese company
1:18:23SPEAKERthat will proxy Kickstarter back for you.
1:18:26SPEAKERLike it was our video with some content
1:18:29SPEAKERoverlaid on top of it.
1:18:31SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:18:32SPEAKERFor like they were- - Back this Kickstarter.
1:18:36SPEAKER- And they were, wow, that's fascinating.
1:18:39SPEAKER- We've seen that in Japan too.
1:18:40SPEAKERLike we've seen companies in Japan listing our product
1:18:44SPEAKERas something they can sell and then ordering them.
1:18:47SPEAKERWe also, about three times a day,
1:18:50SPEAKERget spam from Japanese vendors
1:18:53SPEAKERthat want to be our representatives in Japan
1:18:56SPEAKERor to run a crowdfunding campaign for us in Japan.
1:18:59SPEAKERAnd they are, the emails are very clearly templated.
1:19:03SPEAKERThey are all derivatives of the same template.
1:19:06SPEAKERIt's like, hello, my name is, I am the president of blank.
1:19:09SPEAKEROne of them started with, hello, my name is administrator.
1:19:13SPEAKER- (laughs) Okay.
1:19:14SPEAKER- But like, I don't know what the deal is.
1:19:17SPEAKERBut it really is like three of these a day.
1:19:19SPEAKER- Wow.
1:19:21SPEAKERIt's fascinating.
1:19:21SPEAKERWell, thank you so, so much, Jesse.
1:19:23SPEAKERWe really appreciate it.
1:19:24SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you.
1:19:25SPEAKERManufacturing is such a black box for people who,
1:19:28SPEAKERbasically everybody who doesn't work in it.
1:19:30SPEAKERSo like getting this kind of insight into that world
1:19:32SPEAKERand what it takes to actually get it done
1:19:33SPEAKERis really fascinating.
1:19:35SPEAKER- Thank you, it's fun to chat.
1:19:36SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:19:39SPEAKER- Brad, it's the time of the show
1:19:40SPEAKERwhere we thank our patrons.
1:19:42SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:19:43SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:19:44SPEAKERAs always, we appreciate all of you.
1:19:46SPEAKEREverybody who listens, we appreciate.
1:19:47SPEAKERWe especially, especially appreciate the patrons
1:19:50SPEAKERwho help support the show financially
1:19:51SPEAKER'cause we are 100% listener supported.
1:19:53SPEAKERThere's no ads.
1:19:55SPEAKERThere's no sponsors.
1:19:57SPEAKERThere's no big money rolling in here to influence us.
1:20:02SPEAKER- Grass roots.
1:20:03SPEAKER- Yes, we are from the people.
1:20:06SPEAKERAnd if you would like to help support the show,
1:20:08SPEAKERyou can by going to patreon.com/techpod.
1:20:12SPEAKERThat's patreon.com/techpod.
1:20:15SPEAKER- Did you know, I was told that if you want
1:20:17SPEAKERto have people remember something,
1:20:19SPEAKERyou say it three times, Brad?
1:20:20SPEAKER- Three times?
1:20:21SPEAKER- Three times.
1:20:22SPEAKER- Here, I was thinking like twice,
1:20:23SPEAKERwas like, man, he's really going for it here.
1:20:25SPEAKER- The media training people said three times,
1:20:27SPEAKERwhich is why I'm gonna say it again,
1:20:28SPEAKERpatreon.com/techpod.
1:20:30SPEAKERYou can get access to the fabulous Tech Pod Discord
1:20:33SPEAKERwhere we have great conversations pretty much every day.
1:20:35SPEAKER- A pal did everything.
1:20:36SPEAKER- Topics, topics of note.
1:20:38SPEAKER- Under the sun, yes.
1:20:40SPEAKER- Today, I talked about,
1:20:42SPEAKERwell, I can't talk about that on the podcast.
1:20:45SPEAKER- Boy, what is being discussed in there?
1:20:47SPEAKER- Well, look, we had a Tech Pod,
1:20:48SPEAKERan after dark Tech Pod conversation.
1:20:50SPEAKERWe did talk about,
1:20:51SPEAKERthe prophecy did come true though last week.
1:20:54SPEAKER- What's the prophecy?
1:20:54SPEAKER- Did you know,
1:20:55SPEAKERdo you know what January 21st is every year?
1:20:58SPEAKER- Hang on, I'm trying to think.
1:21:00SPEAKERTrying to think, I do not.
1:21:01SPEAKER- It's International Sweatpants Tech Pod Day, Brad.
1:21:05SPEAKER- Wow.
1:21:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:21:07SPEAKER- We've only got, what, five, six months to go.
1:21:10SPEAKER- We're not gonna be in Trolls 2, unfortunately.
1:21:12SPEAKER- But we do have International Sweatpants Day, so.
1:21:15SPEAKER- That's fantastic.
1:21:16SPEAKER- Mission accomplished.
1:21:18SPEAKERThis is the, no, this is not the last episode of the month.
1:21:21SPEAKERThis is the last episode of the month.
1:21:24SPEAKER- Close enough.
1:21:25SPEAKERWe'll do emails next week.
1:21:26SPEAKER- But we have to thank a lot more patrons
1:21:28SPEAKERas a result of that.
1:21:30SPEAKERSo as always, thank you to our executive producer,
1:21:32SPEAKERtier patrons, Andrew Slosky, David Allen, Jacob Chappell,
1:21:36SPEAKERJames Kamik, Joel Krauska, The Bunny Fiend,
1:21:39SPEAKERand Twinkle Twinkie.
1:21:40SPEAKERBut also, once a month, we thank our associate producer
1:21:43SPEAKERlevel patrons, Alejandro Navarro, Andre Burke,
1:21:47SPEAKERArthur Gies, Brad Van Orman, Brian Rabe, Dan Brockman,
1:21:51SPEAKERDave Yulian, David Fan, Donato Sinoco the Third.
1:21:56SPEAKERI'm a third too, you know, Brad.
1:21:57SPEAKER- I didn't know that.
1:21:58SPEAKER- Graham Banks, Jacob Wilson, Jad Rita, Jason Nieland,
1:22:02SPEAKERJay Mabey, Jorge Pereira, Josh Klein, Julian,
1:22:07SPEAKERSanchik Kumar, Terry Cox, Thomas Shea, and Wedge.
1:22:11SPEAKERThank you all so much, we appreciate it so much.
1:22:13SPEAKER- Absolutely, thank you so much, and I'm very excited.
1:22:16SPEAKER- Yes.
1:22:16SPEAKER- Well, a little piece of business, a point of order here.
1:22:19SPEAKER- Yes.
1:22:19SPEAKER- I've been saying for the last four months, five months,
1:22:22SPEAKERthat we should do this, and we've never done it.
1:22:24SPEAKER- But is the, well, yes.
1:22:26SPEAKER- Here we go.
1:22:27SPEAKEREmails next week, send in your emails.
1:22:29SPEAKERWe always forget to solicit emails
1:22:32SPEAKERon the prior show to the email show.
1:22:34SPEAKER- Absolutely, yeah.
1:22:35SPEAKERSo how do you send an email in to the podcast, Brad?
1:22:38SPEAKER- Is it techpod@content.town?
1:22:41SPEAKER- That is correct, it is techpod@content.town.
1:22:44SPEAKERWait, what's that address one more time?
1:22:46SPEAKER- Techpod@, I cannot believe they made a top-level domain
1:22:49SPEAKERcalled .town, but they did it.
1:22:51SPEAKERIt is techpod@content.town.
1:22:54SPEAKER- So again, if you want to support the Patreon,
1:22:56SPEAKERit's patreon.com/techpod, we appreciate it so much.
1:22:59SPEAKERAnd the email address is techpod@content.town.
1:23:02SPEAKERIf you're in the Discord, if you're already a patron,
1:23:04SPEAKERyou can just go into the Q&A section,
1:23:07SPEAKERinto the channel that is labeled Questions Seeking Answers,
1:23:10SPEAKERwhere you can scream into the void.
1:23:12SPEAKERYou post a question, it disappears after a moment.
1:23:15SPEAKER- Drop 'em in there, nobody but us will ever see it.
1:23:17SPEAKER- Yeah, well, also people who are in the channel
1:23:20SPEAKERat that exact same moment will see it briefly,
1:23:21SPEAKERbut then it'll go away.
1:23:22SPEAKER- That's a minor loophole, we don't talk about that.
1:23:24SPEAKER- Look, I don't want people to put any confessions
1:23:26SPEAKERthat are gonna be actionable.
1:23:28SPEAKERWe have mandatory reporters in there.
1:23:30SPEAKERAnyway, we will see you all next week.
1:23:33SPEAKERThanks for listening, everybody.
1:23:33SPEAKERHave a wonderful weekend.
1:23:35SPEAKERThanks again to Jesse for being on the show.
1:23:38SPEAKERI learned a lot about manufacturing today.
1:23:40SPEAKER- Same, absolutely.
1:23:42SPEAKER- I knew it was complicated,
1:23:43SPEAKERbut I don't think I knew it was gonna be that complicated.
1:23:45SPEAKER- That was a lot.
1:23:46SPEAKERI don't think I will try to make any keyboards
1:23:48SPEAKERanytime soon, or maybe anything else ever.
1:23:50SPEAKER- I wanna shoot some caps, man.
1:23:52SPEAKERI wanna feel those fresh key caps
1:23:53SPEAKERright off the injection molds.
1:23:55SPEAKER- What you do on your own time is your business.
1:23:57SPEAKER- See you all next week.
1:23:59SPEAKERBye, everybody.
1:23:59SPEAKER(upbeat music)
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