deskthority

Heya,

I am on a mission! And if you are from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain or Germany then you might understand why.

Maybe it is just my impression but I believe that users from these countries make up quite a notable faction of the international keyboard enthusiasts scene. There would be significantly more users if you also count the keyboard enthusiasts engaged in local, non-Englisch communities.

Most of the larger keycap/keyboard community GBs are focussing on ANSI-US as the only properly supported language, sometimes you see a grain of UK support or - in Signature Plastic GBs - you might encounter a NORDIC kit that barely reaches MOQ because it adds another 40$ to an already expensive keycap set.

I would like to change this but had to realize this wouldn't be a simple task. I am working on two factors here:

- Create and refine an optimized set of keycaps that will give the best support for users from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK and Germany with the smallest amount of keycaps possible. Bear with me, no one will get all the legends perfect to the last detail but I just hope many of you can live with what I came up with:

More details and discussion here:
workshop-f7/designing-the-ultimate-nord ... 14443.html

- The second factor is getting together a group of people interested in customs keycap sets from the covered countries. This is almost as important as getting the keycaps selected right. I want to be able to "sell" this ISO-International add on during their Interest Check phase and advertise any GB that is including these keycaps to all of you. The more people we can collect here to focus our common interest, the more likely it is we will be seeing good support for our locales in customs keycap sets.

Now I know that especially the NORDIC keyboard enthusiasts have often resorted to switching to ANSI-US due to lack of nice keycap sets in their layout. You are a very strong group though and I need your support here. The same thing applies to German users - at a lower scale though because Germans can rely on a solid supply of Vintage Cherry keycaps - please support us even if you gave up hoping for a nice, customs ISO-DE keycaps set long ago. Together we can make it happen!

The most important part is spreading this message in ANY local communities you know about or are a part of. We have to get the members from local keyboard communities on board and make them aware of nice ISO-International keycap sets. My perception is most of the smaller local keyboard communities stopped bothering about nice customs keycap GBs long ago because support for their local was never found and with their man power it was difficult or impossible to make an impact. This is why I want to get everyone together from the international communities (Deskthority, Geekhack, /r/MechanicalKeyboards) as well as the smaller national communities.

As an additional idea, I offer to collect orders from EU participants and handle the international shipping & import. If we find a GMK GB run somewhere around the world with 25€ shipping to the EU per order, we can collect our orders during the GB phase. I will collect payment and place one large group order and then distribute the keycap sets within the EU for cheaper shipping and no additional Tax/Customs hassle.

My idea to setup this group was a simple mailing list. I call it the "NordEUk Union". A mailing list doesn't require anyone to create a new account somewhere and check it for messages or get annoying notifications from a service. I will use this mailing list to inform members about upcoming GBs that I find interesting or that were forwarded to my be other members. I will gauge the interest of the union members through online polls or surveys and based on the results approach the IC/GB runner about adding ISO-International support.

Please be aware that we are talking about 100$+ keycap sets here. It will mostly be GMK keycap sets made from doubleshot ABS.

Looking forward to read your feedback


LINK TO THE MAILING LIST SUBSCRIPTION:
http://eepurl.com/cnrzTj

Hey Wodan,

I highly appreciate what you are doing with HADapter, and now this one as well. Subscribed, will spread to hardwareluxx.de and computerbase.de.

I like the Idea, it drove me completely nuts when I used ISO layout. I've switched to ANSI though... Now I have a 6U spacebar, non standard caps and Topre stems, still no caps for me still fucked

How about having blank HADapter caps instead of printed?

Can you please change your title to contain information? Thanks.

Topic is now a little bit more descriptive.

Join the NordEUk Union!

A first GB designer has shown interest in the ISO International Essentials. Using this as an excuse to bump this once again

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=85609.0

Very cool! By the way, great idea to make the "GB Designer Version" you might consider also making a "DSA GB Designer Version" since DSA kits could eliminate a couple of keycaps

Thanks for all the support, I keep getting more subscriptions

Scarpia wrote: ↑Very cool! By the way, great idea to make the "GB Designer Version" you might consider also making a "DSA GB Designer Version" since DSA kits could eliminate a couple of keycaps

For the time being, Signature Plastic GBs are not our target audience yet. Their international kits have a much smaller MOQ and usually work quite well. If this is a success, maybe we can extend this to smaller SP GBs that otherwise have a hard time hitting MOQ. In that case we'd also need a non-profiled version of the kit. At first glance, it looks like we can save three caps from the set in a non-profiled GB.

Very cool! I hope this will get some traction!

Hey Wodan!

I really appericate this! Go go go!

Thanks for doing this.

The ISO INT kit covers almost every keycap for me (Norway), and it's interesting to see that we don't actually need that many extra caps to cover most EU/Nordic countries.

Good initiative! It's tiring to be treated like a second class citizen when our metric units are far superior to those filthy imperialist imperial units. Stuff like the XDA kit had me real excited, just to later notice that the international kit is as much as the alphanumerics and it wouldn't even cover the enter key... :/

Thanks for the support everyone.

Please remember to spread the word in any LOCAL/NATIONAL keyboard/tech communities you might be active in. We need to reach the non-international players as well

And kbdfr ... the French really did themselves a favour when they went ALL OUT designing their keyboard layout. ISO-FR support has been spotted in some GBs though!

Wodan wrote: ↑[…] the French really did themselves a favour when they went ALL OUT designing their keyboard layout […]

They already knew
Good luck to all!

Hmh Entrée

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrée

At the moment there is GB for international GMK carbon kit over massdrop but it has received almost no coverage over community. GH interest check is closed, there is no active GB thread of any kind. This is just sad

I suspect that an international kit would have to be incorporated in the main set from the beginning.

salasource wrote: ↑At the moment there is GB for international GMK carbon kit over massdrop but it has received almost no coverage over community. GH interest check is closed, there is no active GB thread of any kind. This is just sad

If you check the GMK Carbon IC thread you will see that Tombery was talking about this a lot. I am working on my first newsletter and it will cover this "Drop" as well as GMK Retro and other GMK GBs in IC phase.

lordzebu wrote: ↑I suspect that an international kit would have to be incorporated in the main set from the beginning.

Indeed, that's the plan. During the IC phase is a great period to get in touch with the GB designer and convince him/her that the ISO Essentials are worth considering for the base kit.

Massdrop is going a new way with their GMK Retro drop but for some odd reason they made TWO different ISO kits and both just cover ISO-UK. I have already positioned my ISO essentials there and can only hope it is considered. It's a bit difficult to get into the Massdrop kits before launch since there is often no public IC phase.

Hi Wodan,
Is the list still active in 2020?

Wintermute1974 wrote: ↑

20 Nov 2020, 17:10

Hi Wodan,
Is the list still active in 2020?

There's been some great progress towards ISO/Norde support in GMK and other keycap GBs since. I am not actively driving anything on that front currently though