Silo Beam Spring Switches cancelled

[Johnbo]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/le ... ts/3485667

Such a bummer. I was looking forward to trying those switches. At least we still have Ellipse's project.

[Jugostran]

What a shame. I am always excited for new switch types, and it is damn unfortunate when they get cancelled. I am not sure how it'll work out for Ellipse, but that remains to be seen. His F project was really successful, but also hit quite a few roadblocks on the way.

[mmm]

Oh that sucks, I was excited to see where this was going. Anybody got $300,000+ to spare?

[Muirium]

the final quote from the manufacturer was just far too high for the project to even remotely make sense. The quote came in at over $300k USD, just for the Silo Beam Spring tooling (molds and automated assembly). This was an order of magnitude beyond even our most pessimistic projections, and would take nearly the entire amount collected from Kickstarter.

Who did the accounting? They’re as useless as I am!

Other than these now cancelled switches, the Keystone keyboard was quite forgettable alas.

[mmm]

Prototypes were made, the switch does work and does feel good. But as it stands it just isn't worth the investment to make the Silo Beam Spring switches happen (even after spending years of ours lives trying to will this switch into existence). Perhaps in the right hands (and deep enough pockets) a project like this could still work. In the coming months HaaTa / Jacob Alexander will be sharing his detailed learnings from the project to hopefully help anyone else would attempt something like miniaturizing something like an IBM Beam Spring switch.

This gives me a flicker of hope that it will be possibly to DIY it in the future with a tedious process.

For those that are interested in a click Silo switch we will be offering Silo Clicky for sale after Keystone ships. Reducing the number of permutations that we ship at launch reduces logistical complexity considerably (and helps us ship Keystone faster!). The tooling is already done for these switches (same housing and slider as the Silo Linear and Tactile switches) so it should be relatively quick to produce them.

To anyone curious about these other clickies, it's a click bar mechanism similar to Kailh.

The wiki was recently updated to describe the different kind of Silo switches (link). (Thanks Findacanor)

[Muirium]

D $300k Y. An exclusive club!

[mmm]

D $300k Y. An exclusive club!

Wait you can't shell out $300k for a DIY project? What are you? Poor?

And to be clear, most of the quote wasn't for the molds, it was for the automated assembly to put together these complicated switches. Beam spring switches are a lot more complicated to assemble than standard switches (the beams can break if you do it wrong) and can be very tedious.

I found out there was more to read in the reply, this keeps the hope for a cheap DIY project alive. (I'll just pretend that I do not get very tired attempting to do any kind of modification to a full keyboard worth of switches)

[Muirium]

Cheapskate and proud, baby. Always.

[Johnbo]

Oh that sucks, I was excited to see where this was going. Anybody got $300,000+ to spare?

Dang, I just bought my Lambo last week, otherwise I'd totally have funded this project. Terrible timing.

[JCMax]

I was excited for this project. So hopeful. This was THE most exciting keyboard for me. I was anticipating it above all others. Even over Ellipse's Model F and Beam-spring projects.

It seems like they tried to do too much at once. The Keystone was already ambitious enough with all this hoot-nanny about "adaptive typing AI", "Hall Effect", "Hot-swappable", "X-ray vision inducing", blah, blah...

Just a board with the beam-springs would have been enough. Maybe they can salvage the idea for a future project. Recreating those in a modern switch would still be AWESOME! Just don't overreach with too much packed into a first-of-its-kind keyboard.

[Touch_It]

Sad. I had been really looking forward to this, though admittedly I didn't preorder (rarely do I preorder anything). I had also forgot about this multiple times as it had drug on for so long.

[Muirium]

Dreams can last forever. But projects fall apart when kept waiting for too long.

I won’t blame them for keeping the faith with this one. But the lack of progress after so long usually only ever means one thing. And so it did.