It took some time but the forth revision of /dev/tty is finally available and ready to ship at Drop!

Apart from minor changes to the base kit (yeah there’s an uwu key) and “Lost+Found”, the most important update is for the 40%/ortho keyboards. I believe the 40s kit is one of the most complete around so if you like typing on those little things you better hurry up white it’s hot!

Here below the list of all kits.

When I first announced the Elvish and Dwarvish sets I got inevitably asked about a Black Speech version. That is something that I always wanted to do and in my mind there was only one color way for such a nefarious incarnation: black-on-black.

I realized that 7 years have passed since we started working on MT3 and many might not know the story behind this profile. Also information is scattered on this blog and various forums and it’s not easy to find, so I think it’s time to refresh our memory and put everything together.

Let’s start from the main announcement and reason for this post: I am not collaborating with Drop anymore. You’ll still see some of my products on their website, that’s because they are already produced, but they will slowly fade over time. That means that there won’t be any new product designed by me for Drop. So no Dark Speech Tolkien keycaps, no Elven dices, no full brown Retro, no MT2 set designed by me (in contrast to what I announced few hours ago).

Of course it’s hard to stay objective but I’ll try to stick to facts, things that I can prove and have documentation for (emails/chats/whatever).

I hate it when you have that great idea for a new keyboard layout but you can’t make it because you miss that weird spacebar size. So here they are, MT3 spacebars in all shapes and form. Please note: these are not the same 3D models used to make the actual molds. I redesigned them so we could have spacebar sizes and stem positions not currently supported by the “official” MT3 profile. Well, I designed the MT3 profile, so I guess these are official too :)

We gave too much attention to the Elves recently. We all love them, but we know how pain in a$$ they could be. The previous batch of prototypes for Dwarvish was all messed up so I haven’t showed you anything… until today! I’ve got more prototypes and the sets are simply delicious!

Ever wanted to create a custom keycap to match an existing MT3 set? Of course you can make a mold out of the original but what if you could work directly on a high resolution 3D model?

Well wait no more, STL for ROW 0 and 6.25u spacebar are here! Use them freely even for commercial products but please give credit. The license is Attribution-ShareAlike just let your customers know your work is based on MT3 profile designed by me and we are good :)

If there’s enough interest I will release more keys and possibly spacebars in every possible size. With 3D printers becoming cheaper and easier to use it’s nice to be able to print that one spacebar size needed for some weird custom keyboard.

Of course I’d love to see what you do with the files. Now go creative!

Download the STL files!

Long time I haven’t posted an update about the second round of /dev/tty. As you all well know I wasn’t very happy with the dye-sub quality of the first drop and –honestly– how Massdrop handled the whole development phase.

Fortunately this time things are moving smoother. I’m getting prototypes at a constant pace and the first impression is very good.

Continue reading…

Some of you may have noticed that /dev/tty has dropped again. Waaaay sooner than I expected actually. As you know by now I don’t like to rush a product release and considering the round 1 hiccups, I would have liked a couple of weeks more to plan a good fight strategy.

Anywho. Device Terminal (that’s how you pronounce it!) round 2 is up and kicking. The official name would be /dev/tty1 (it’s 0-based) and we have approximately a month to fix the issues we encountered in the first iteration. Namely the drunken legends. MassDrop reassure me that they made so no more bold, tilted, not-centered legends will leave the factory. I hope they will let me check that before shipping to customers.

Continue reading…

Warning: this is a rant.

Important: the following reflects my opinion and my opinion only. I report the facts at the best of my knowledge/understanding but they are not necessarily accurate.

Of course I’m going to talk about /dev/tty keycaps set and the MT3 profile. The two are actually very different projects.

MT3 is the new profile we designed. It was a long process but it went relatively smooth. We had many iterations of the keys, I got plenty of prototypes both 3D printed and injected. We were able to fine tune the shape up to the very last minute. Indeed the profile came out beautifully, better than my expectations actually. The result is a wonderful new and original profile.

I was expecting the same process to happen for /dev/tty which is the first color scheme released on MT3.

Continue reading…