Input Club’s mechanical keyboards aren’t just about producing exceptional products. They’re also proof that open source can solve any problem.
Keyboards are how we connect to our computers and very often to the rest of the world. The layout of keys is a physical representation of the languages we speak, and this simple tool gives us a limitless ability to communicate. A keyboard is a collection of mechanical and electrical relays that convert touch into digital signals. This allows it to exist both in our world of real objects and in the digital world of computers.
Open source software already powers most of the world, partially because it is free and mostly because it is so accessible. Under an open source system, the flaws and imperfections in every product can be observed, tracked, and fixed, much like the Japanese philosophy of “continuous improvement” known as kaizen, which is applied to every aspect of a process. By following these principles, we believe that the open hardware movement is poised to fundamentally change the global product economy.
At Input Club, we design and produce mechanical keyboards using this same philosophy and workflow, similar to how a person might develop a website or application. The design files for our keyboard frames and circuit boards are available via GitHub. The open source firmware, the Keyboard Layout Language (KLL), has contributors all over the world. This may seem like a standard process to people active in the open source community, but I assure you that it is not the norm when making keyboards.
Why bother making keyboards open source?
This is a question we hear often. People all over the world use keyboards every day, for a variety of purposes. At the core of all our keyboards is the ability to easily reconfigure any key to do any action. While normal typists make do with simple macros like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, programmers and gamers have much more advanced needs. People that use Adobe Photoshop or Premier often have special key bindings for most of their keyboard.
Also, while the English-language QWERTY keyboard layout is the most common type used, there are many other languages spoken on Earth. A standard American National Standards Institute (ANSI) layout is a physical representation of the English language. Languages such as Chinese, Swedish, and Arabic have far more letters and symbols and don’t map perfectly to the ANSI keyboard layout.
Beyond languages, there are many people around the world who use alternative layouts to QWERTY that allow them to type faster and strain their fingers less. Some of these layouts include Colemak, Dvorak, and AZERTY. Using open keyboard firmware enables someone to load all the possible layouts directly onto the keyboard. While there are still some challenges ahead, it will eventually be possible to load layouts for every language such that, no matter which language you speak, you’ll be able to type the symbols you need.
Much like printers and graphing calculators, keyboards have been mostly ignored by the innovation that has swept through the consumer products market over the last 20 years. During the golden age of computing, when companies like IBM were first popularizing personal computers, keyboards were the shining star of any desk. People had to be convinced to use computers, and it made perfect sense to spend time and energy designing the one part that they would actually touch. Production of iconic keyboards like the IBM Model M could cost upwards of $100. Today, most keyboards are mass-produced, disposable devices that may be purchased for under $10. Luckily for our endeavor, people that type often have realized that very little creativity can be imbued into a $10 object.
Where we began
Input Club started as a project to improve on the keyboard market status quo and to develop a production framework that could output any keyboard. The members of Input Club are all based in different cities around the United States, coordinating entirely through Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and online forums. The online mechanical keyboard community is a vibrant collection of makers and hackers that like inventing and building their own keyboards. In the United States, the biggest forums are Geekhack and /r/mechanicalkeyboards, and the European forum is Deskthority. Jacob Alexander, known online as HaaTa, founded Input Club originally to build keyboard projects for the community group-buy platform Massdrop. Massdrop’s model allows people to express interest in a product regardless of whether it exists, enabling things like fancy keyboards to be invented on demand. Working with Massdrop allowed us to develop a no-inventory system of producing keyboards, making only as many as were ordered.