As promised, we will start giving you updates on the manufacturing developments of your Raise keyboard every two weeks.
The tooling process has been going smoothly
It’s only been around 4 weeks since we’ve started so there are only a few small things that have been created and tested.
Here’s our die cut machine for the Mylar bottom plate! Exciting!????
Die cut machine
We’ve received photos of the samples of the silver Mylar sticker that will be placed at the bottom of your keyboard. They will have the same color and texture as the aluminum body.
Silver mylar
We also have photos of the rubber feet of both the black and silver version. Each half of the keyboard will have 6 rubber feet, all with a height of 1 millimeter.
One component we have that didn’t require a tooling is the white keycap/switch puller. We still need to modify the logo on it but that's just a minor adjustment.
Everyone who ordered a Raise will get one: black for the black Raise, and white for the silver Raise.
We are hoping to receive more photos in the next 2 weeks. The next component that we’re expecting is the palm pads! We talked about the new palm pad solution in one of our last updates. Give it a quick read or watch the video we made to learn more about it.
That’s all for the manufacturing updates!
As for the technical updates, we have been working on measuring the quality of the LEDs
We noticed that the intensity of green color in the LEDs was not the same as the previous samples. Initially, we thought it was because of the transparent base. But then we quickly realized that the color itself was different.
It was hard to spot early on because we found out that Matt, our CTO, and Manel, our Product Manager, are actually color blind ???? But good thing Luis, our all-knowing CEO, was able to spot it!
In order to check this, we made a test jig to compare their intensities and had the results in a graph. The result we want is for each color, -red, green, blue-, to have the minimum of the other 2 colors.
Graph of the color distribution that we want
What we learned was that for the latest batch of LEDs, the green LED had far too much blue, so that’s why it didn’t look as green as it should.
The test jig for the LEDs
The left LEDs look greener than the right one. The left one is what we want!
So we had to recheck all the LED samples we had ever received from our supplier and checked them all ourselves. We then cross-referenced them to the pack of LEDs it came from and sent our data back to our suppliers.
If we’re going to mass produce the Dygma Raise, we need to make sure we are using the right LEDs, even if it means doing the extra quality control check ourselves.
In the next week, the test jig will be doing a 24-hour burn test on all of the LEDs. This will allow us to check how things change over time so we can make sure that the quality of the LEDs is the best we can achieve.
We’ll be keeping you updated on our developments, as always. But if you have any ideas on how we can improve our updates, please let us know!
Thanks for reading our update!
