2. We got some of our tooling back!
3. Chrysalis is officially out of alpha!
4. We’re making another keyboard!
Hello from Oakland,
In June, we ended things on a bit of a cliffhanger about negotiations with our old factory. Below, you can read the next chapter in that saga. But first, we have a bit of exciting news to share.
We’re making another keyboard!
The Atreus 2
An early prototype of the Atreus 2 co-developed with Technomancy, presented with a banana, for scale. (The shipping product will have different keycaps and a black plate and enclosure.)
Over the past few months, we’ve been putting together our first official collaboration.
We’ve long been fans of the Technomancy Atreus, a minimalist ergonomic keyboard that shares much of its DNA with the Model 01. It’s an open keyboard design. Folks in the community frequently build themselves an Atreus with nothing but a laser-cutter, an Arduino, and a handful of switches.
Earlier in 2019, Phil Hagelberg, the Atreus’ creator approached us to do a design review of an update to the Atreus’ circuit board he was considering. We got to talking and realized that we might finally be in a good position to do more than just review his design.
Over the summer, we did a ground-up redesign of the Atreus’ circuit board to improve quality and reduce costs. (The only change to the key layout from the original Atreus is that Phil snuck in another couple keys.) From there, we started talking to potential keyboard factories.
We’ve selected the factory we’ll be working with. They’ve helped us design a sturdy ultra-minimalist tray-style enclosure. It makes the classic laser-cut Atreus look...big.
Our goal with the “Atreus 2” is to offer a fully assembled keyboard at an attractive price. The keyboard will run Kaleidoscope and be customizable with Chrysalis. (It’s based on a Microchip ATmega32U4, so should also be able to run other keyboard firmware like QMK.)
The Atreus 2 will ship with MX-style switches in hot-swap sockets, so you’ll be able to swap keyswitches without soldering.
We expect to open presales for the Atreus 2 within the next couple months.
It’s been quite a long time coming, but we’re finally ready to announce the beta release of Chrysalis, our graphical configuration tool for keyboards running Kaleidoscope.
Chrysalis makes it easy to change your keyboard’s layout and LED color schemes without editing text files or compiling anything. It also has built-in functionality to help you update your keyboard’s firmware to the latest version.
Upcoming features include display of non-ASCII key layouts and the ability to build macros from within Chrysalis.
What happened next
When we last wrote, our old factory had definitively refused to give us our tooling, our inventory, and to return the money we'd paid for things that hadn't been delivered.
They said that they didn't want to return our tooling because they believed that if they did, we wouldn't place another order with them. We were very clear that we would never place another order with them and that it was a choice between returning our tooling and us filing a lawsuit, but that didn't seem to make much of an impact on them.
We left you on a bit of a cliff-hanger, though it should come as no surprise to anybody that the next thing we did was to file a lawsuit against them in the Chinese courts.
Apparently, one of the options available for a contract lawsuit in China is for the court to appoint a mediator to try to resolve the issue without time and expense of a trial. Our lawyer recommended that we try mediation first and we agreed with her.
It took a few months for the court to appoint a mediator and a good bit of time after that for everybody to sit down for a first mediation session.
Because negotiation is ongoing, we can't yet talk much about the process, though we may be able to in the future. (There are some good stories.)
One of our top priorities has been to get back enough of our tooling to make the keycap sets we owe you.
At a certain point in the mediation, the mediator brought in the judge to help expedite things. The judge...suggested that the factory turn over all of our tooling and any inventory the factory wanted credit for right away, as that would help make the rest of the mediation a good deal simpler. (Once it's "just" about money, it's a lot easier for the court to evaluate.)
At the last minute, the factory told our lawyer and the judge that they weren't going to give back all of our tooling, just...most of it. They had some explanations, but they didn't really make any sense.
Way back in May, we'd signed a "tooling custody" contract with another keyboard factory used by some of our friends. The idea was that once our old factory agreed to release our tooling, this other factory would pick up the tooling, inspect it, test it, and hold onto it for us. As part of a separate contract, they'd also produce new keycap sets for us.
In early September, the new factory sent a truck to the old factory to pick up everything they could.
To our great surprise, they actually got back most of our tooling.
Injection molding tooling
They got the baseplate tooling.
They got the stand tooling.
They got the rail tooling.
They got the center bar tooling.
They got the keyplate tooling.
They got the rubber foot tooling.
They got the wave soldering jigs.
They got the PCB testing jig.
They got the keycap painting jig tooling.
They got the keycap tooling.
They didn't get the tooling for the plastic package for keycap sets.
They didn't get the keycap "transfer" tooling, used to move the keycaps from the injection molding machine to the painting jigs.
More on those a bit later.
They were also supposed to pick up around 1300 sets of unpainted, black, and QWERTY keycaps which we knew to be sitting in the old factory's warehouse.
Initially, the old factory said that there must be some mistake, as there were no keycap sets in their warehouse, but the mediator made a phone call and resolved that issue.
The new factory got about 600 sets of black keycaps, packaged and ready to ship. Those are now in our Hong Kong warehouse, ready to send out to folks who order them. (This is a little odd, because it's actually -more- of those than we'd ordered.)
They also got another 800 or so sets of unpainted keycaps (without UV coating) still on the painting jigs and we expect to be able to use those to partially fill the orders for Dvorak, Colemak, and Linear A.
This set didn't pass QC
The old factory also offered up about 1000 more sets of QWERTY keycaps which had failed quality control checks some time in the past, but the new factory declined to take those.
A new era
Over the course of the past few weeks, we've been working with the new factory to test all of the tooling and to formulate a plan to produce Dvorak, Colemak, and Linear A keysets, as well as some extra QWERTY and unpainted sets.
The plan was that the new factory inspected the injection molding tools one by one and then set them up on molding machines to make sure they worked, as well as to dial in materials, temperature, and cycle times.
Western friends with decades more manufacturing experience than we have warned us that things might not go smoothly. In their experience, it was nearly unheard of for injection tooling designed for use on one machine type at one factory to "just work" when transported to another factory and set up on another type of injection molding machine.
We're happy to be able to report that our friends' worries were largely unfounded.
Tooling tests finished up on the 27th.
The baseplate tooling was fine:
The stand tooling looked great:
The rail tooling worked perfectly:
The center bar tooling had a small nick at one end, but that should be possible to fix up pretty easily. We did discover that the center bars produced by the old factory weren't made with glass-filled nylon as we'd been promised, but had, instead, been made out of a mix of ABS and polycarbonate, like the stands and baseplates. After some testing, the new factory told us that they found the ABS+PC mix seems to be a better fit for these parts, so we're just rolling with it.
Damaged tooling leads to nicks in the center bars
We didn't test the keyplate stamping tooling or the rubber foot tooling, but that's inexpensive and would be pretty easy to repair or replace.
We also haven't tested the keycap painting jig tooling, but aren't too worried about it.
The very last tool to get tested was the keycap injection tooling.
The old factory outsourced keycap injection molding to one supplier, keycap painting (and UV-protectant coating) to another supplier, and keycap laser engraving to a third supplier. The new factory does all of these things in-house.
The first thing that the factory discovered when getting ready to test the keycap injection-mold tooling was that the existing keycaps, which were supposed to have been made from a mix of ABS and polycarbonate just...weren't. They're ABS. They discovered this when trying to inject a sample set of keycaps out of ABS and polycarbonate. When melted, ABS will "flow" through a mold much more easily than polycarbonate will. The mold just wasn't designed to let enough plastic flow through into all the keycaps when there was polycarbonate in the mix. In fact, the "normal" ABS material the factory used didn't even flow well enough to inject full sets of keycaps. They had to switch to a formulation of ABS designed to flow better in stubborn molds.
We’re going to roll with the punches and use the factory’s recommended ABS formulation going forward. Adding polycarbonate to ABS makes it stronger, but can make it more brittle. It can also change how much light shines through the plastic. We have, as yet, had no reports of a Model 01 keycap's plastic breaking. Because our keycaps are painted, the plastic inside doesn't really matter a whole lot in day to day usage. When you're typing on a Model 01, your fingers never touch the plastic. They're touching the clear UV-protectant coating on top of black paint.
In the end, the new factory figured out a plastic type, pressure, temperature, and cycle time that produced workable keycaps. And that's where they ran into the problem alluded to earlier. The old factory never handed over the keycap transfer tooling, despite having charged us for it.
In an earlier backer update, we showed you this video of how keycap sets were molded and moved from the injection molding machines to the painting jigs. It does clever things with vacuums and razors to pull all of the keycaps out of the mold and get them onto the painting jigs with minimal human involvement.
The new factory advised us against creating new transfer tooling for now: it’s relatively expensive and time-consuming to make, and we’ve been considering remaking the keycap tooling in the future. (As you might guess from the number of manufacturing issues we’ve had with the keycaps, this tooling was not terribly well designed.)
As they were doing the injection tests, the factory hit upon a decidedly low-tech solution for getting full keycap sets out of the molding machine:
When we commented that this seemed to be a very labor intensive way to get a set of keycaps out of the mold, the factory said that for production, they'd ordered extra-wide tape.
Once the injection molding machine got dialed in, the factory sent us some photos showing how the light shines through the new keycaps.
In the picture above, one of the unpainted keycaps is from the old factory and the other is from the new factory. They transmit very, very similar amounts of light. If anything the new ones actually let through a bit more light.
As mentioned earlier, the old supplier hadn't turned over the tooling for the plastic packaging for keycap sets.
This is what our keycap packaging has historically looked like
We ended up needing to have new keycap packaging tooling made. Last time around, this was a three month process that, we were told, took multiple suppliers before we got something usable.
The old packaging was a little bit bulkier than we wanted, which led to slightly higher shipping charges than we'd planned for. We asked the new factory to try to make the new packaging smaller than an A4 sheet of paper and suggested that they consider rotating the left and right hands' keycaps. They managed to put together a design that came in a few mm under an A4 sheet.
This time around, once we'd agreed on a design, it took a week to get to a first sample out of the tooling:
This is our new keycap packaging
Right now, most factories in China are closed for the Golden Week holiday. Next week, the new factory expects to get us a full quotation for keycap sets, along with an estimated lead-time.
Once we get the pricing and lead-time figured out, we'll let you know, either with a full backer update, a comment on this post, or some tweets as @keyboardio.
Before we ship out any keycaps, we'll be in touch by email to ask you to confirm your current address.
Keyswitch issues
We've had a handful of reports of mechanically failed keyswitches on keyboards either near the end of their one year warranty period or after their warranties have expired. In one case, an unlucky customer has run into two failed switches.
The hallmarks of a failed switch are a key that either never generates keypresses or never stops generating keypresses once it starts. The switches we’re using are rated for 50 million keypresses, or 1.5 years of hitting a key every second, so we were a bit surprised. We've been working with our keyswitch supplier to find a root cause and even delivered samples of the failed switches directly to the general manager of their manufacturing partner for lab analysis, but haven't heard results from their side.
We've been providing customers affected by this issue with two options for remediation:
1) If you're not comfortable with a soldering iron, we'll perform the repair in California, at no charge for parts or labor, even if your warranty has expired. (If your warranty has expired, we'll ask you to pay the return shipping.)
2) If you or someone near you is handy with a soldering iron, we're happy to send you a few replacement switches. If your warranty has expired and you're outside the US, we'll ask you to cover the shipping for the keyswitches.
If you're running into this issue (or any other issue), please don't hesitate to email us at [email protected].
While we can't promise that we'll be able to continue to offer free repairs or free replacement switches for out-of-warranty keyboards perpetually, we'll keep doing it as long as we can.
Model 01 Stock
Moving to a new supplier and having to redo some of our tooling is a natural time to look at the Model 01’s design to see what, if anything, we might want to update. We’re deep into that process, but don’t currently know when we’ll have anything to announce on that front.
We have enough Model 01s in stock to last for a little while, but aren’t yet set up to produce new butterfly-shaped keyboards at the new factory. There is a chance that we’ll run out of stock before new keyboards are on the assembly line.
If you think you’re going to want a Model 01 in the near future, now is a great time to order it from https://shop.keyboard.io.
<3 Jesse + Kaia
June 2019: You won’t believe what happened next
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 02:34:49 AM
TL;DR:
Travel cases are in stock. Keyboards, including loud-click, are in stock
Preordered Blank, Black and QWERTY keycaps shipped out in January; due to ongoing factory issues, we’re working on Plan B for the rest of the keycaps
Also inside: How factory bank account scams usually work
Hello from Oakland!
Travel cases and keyboards are in stock
We’re happy to report that we have travel cases in stock for immediate shipment. If you missed the Kickstarter campaign for the travel case, now’s your chance to order one.
If you've been waiting for a Model 01 with Matias Loud-Click switches, this is probably your last chance to order one from us. (It's important to know that some early customers found that some keys on Loud-Click Model 01 felt much stiffer than the other keys.)
It's been quite a while since our last newsletter! We have a lot to tell you, so we’ve decided to split this update in half. Expect another update next month.
When we last wrote, Jesse had just returned from China, having worked out a new contract with our factory. They'd agreed to firm delivery dates for all the keyboards and keycaps they still owed us. Additionally, they'd agreed to financial penalties if they missed those delivery dates. They'd confirmed in writing that we own all of the "tooling" (injection molds, jigs, etc—basically all the capital equipment) needed to manufacture the Model 01.
Things got off to a bit of a slow start.
Blank, Black and QWERTY keycaps
The first things the factory promised to deliver to us were 2700 sets of the Blank, Black and QWERTY keycaps. They’d manufactured those months and months ago. They were literally gathering dust in the factory’s warehouse.
The factory agreed to release the keycaps, but asked us to pay the shipping charges again, since their former sales person hadn't yet returned the money she stole. According to contract we signed in November, we didn’t have to pay for shipping, but we wanted to get you your keycaps. So we agreed, with the caveat that we expected to get the money back eventually.
Shortly before the Chinese New Year holiday in late January, the factory sent us tracking numbers for the 1934 sets of keycaps they'd sent out to you. And the keycaps do in fact look pretty nice!
After they shipped out these keycaps, however, almost 800 sets were still sitting in their warehouse, despite a promise to hand them over to us. (Spoiler: they’re still sitting in the factory’s warehouse.)
Keyboards
When we signed the agreement in November, the factory agreed that they still owed us 735 keyboards and promised to deliver them before the end of December. For a variety of reasons, it was late April before the keyboards finally passed our quality control checks and the factory agreed to ship them to us. There was just one small surprise: We'd ordered 735 Quiet-Click keyboards, but they'd made 663 Quiet-Click keyboards and 72 Loud-Click keyboards.
If you've been waiting for a Loud-Click Model 01, we're happy to announce that they are once again available for purchase from us. It's important to know that Loud-Click Matias switches are somewhat sensitive to being pressed off-center. Some early customers found that some keys on Loud-Click Model 01 felt much stiffer than others.
If you still want a Model 01 with Loud-Click switches, this is probably your last chance. You can buy one here:
In the agreement we signed with the factory in November, they promised to produce the Colemak, Dvorak, and Linear A keycap sets they owed us. In the days after signing the new agreement, we went over how many of each set we expected and sent fresh copies of the design documents.
Over the course of the next couple months, the factory did not, in fact, produce these sets of keycaps. When we asked, they told us that they were waiting on their former salesperson to pay them back or "place the order." We explained that this was not the deal we had with them. Our local project manager explained that this was not the deal we had with them. Our Shenzhen lawyer explained that this was not the deal we had with them. Nothing we said seemed to matter.
As the weeks wore on, we told them that they were in breach of the new contract they'd signed with us in November. In response, they told us that they'd lost a lot of money on this project and that they might be willing to make the sets of keycaps they owed us if we placed a new order for more keyboards. We told them that we would be willing to discuss future orders after they'd delivered on the current contract.
Figuring out plan B
Sometime around March, we started to make plans to move our tooling from the old factory to a new keyboard factory who would produce the remaining sets of keycaps for us and safeguard our tooling. This other factory came reasonably well recommended by friends who are producing a keyboard there. They were willing to pick up all of our tooling, inspect it, and hold it for us, whether or not we ended up producing keyboards with them.
It took a little while to get all that paperwork signed.
Finally, as May rolled around, we told the factory that it was too late. We no longer needed them to produce the remaining keycap sets. We gave them the contractually agreed seven days notice that we would be repossessing our tooling, consigned parts, and all fixtures and jigs.
This was all scheduled to happen while Jesse was in Taipei for Computex, the biggest electronics tradeshow in Asia. If everything went as planned, he'd be able to check keycap samples from the new factory when he was in Shenzhen the following week.
Four buildings of this... 40K attendees and 5.5K booths
Forty-eight hours later, we hadn't heard back from them. We reached out to the factory boss. He told us that he was "checking with the engineer", which felt like a little bit of a cop-out but wasn't inherently unreasonable. Two days later, we hadn't heard anything else from the factory, so we reached out to our new sales contact. She told us that the factory boss was really unhappy that we wanted our tooling back. We explained that we were also really unhappy with the situation, but that his unhappiness did not absolve him of his legal obligations.
She told us that nothing was going to happen that week anyway, because the boss was already in Taiwan for Computex.
Two days later, Jesse walked up to the factory's booth at Computex and sat down for an unscheduled meeting with the factory boss, factory CFO, and our new salesperson.
Jesse explained again that the factory needed to give us back our tooling, that they had failed to deliver keycaps they were contractually obligated to deliver, that they had been failing to meet their warranty obligations to us, and that at this point, there was absolutely nothing they could do to salvage the business relationship.
They told Jesse that they did not want to return the tooling because they had lost a great deal of money on this project and that if we took our tooling back, there was no chance we would place another order with them, so they wouldn't be able to make back their loss.
Jesse explained that they seemed to be misunderstanding something fairly fundamental about our position. There was no chance that we would place another order with them. The choice was now between returning our tooling and a lawsuit. If they chose not to return our tooling, their losses would be greater, not smaller.
They asked if there was any other option. We told them that we would not take the tooling immediately if they agreed to produce the keycaps they had previously agreed to produce, but that they would have to agree, in writing, to firm delivery dates.
They told us that they would make the keycaps if we agreed to place another order for more Model 01s with them. We told that we'd have to be crazy to agree to that: no company could rationally agree to place a new order with a supplier who openly ignored negotiated contract terms and refused to return customer property when asked.
They told us that we could just verbally agree to place a new order, without paying any sort of down payment or signing anything. That would be enough.
We said no.
They said that the order could be tiny. 10% of the size of our original order.
We said no.
They said please.
It would have been so easy to say yes.
We said no.
We told them that it would be really easy for us to lie and tell them what they wanted to hear to get them to do what we wanted, but that we weren't willing to lie to get what we wanted.
We asked why they'd signed the contract in November if they hadn't intended to honor it.
They said that they'd been trying to protect us. They told us that they still believed our former salesperson would pay them back and that if they hadn't signed the contract, they worried we would have gone to the police, resulting in the salesperson going to jail without paying them back.
We told them that agreeing to a contract they didn't intend to honor was not, in fact, a way to protect us.
We told them that we really wanted to collaborate with them to sue our former salesperson, but that if they didn't produce the keycaps they owed us and didn't return our tooling, we were probably going to end up having to sue them and our sales person.
At one point, after more than an hour of discussion about how their deal with their former salesperson had no bearing on the contract with us, the factory boss again tried to contact the former salesperson to ask her about when she'd repay them.
We reminded them that we tend to be fairly open with our customers and the public about our experiences, but that up to now, we hadn't ever told our customers the name of our factory. We told them that lawsuits are not secret or private and that they really did not want to be known as the keyboard factory who refuses to honor contracts with customers and refuses to return customer tooling when asked. It, of course, felt weird pointing this out.
They claimed a newfound understanding of the contract, how badly they'd let us down, and what they needed to do to fix it. They asked for additional time to get us an answer because they needed to have a shareholder meeting to discuss the issue and how to resolve it.
Given that it was the middle of a tradeshow and that half of the management team was actively working the show, we agreed. They asked for an additional week. We said that wasn't really acceptable. They next proposed that they'd discuss it Saturday night after the end of Computex and have an answer for us on Sunday morning. We said ok.
We told them that we needed to know if they intended to make your keycaps or if they intended to return our tooling. There was no other answer that would be acceptable to us.
Sunday morning rolled around and there was no update from the factory.
Jesse asked them for their final decision.
They told us that they would not return our tooling, but that they would make the keycaps if we placed a new order for more keyboards.
We told them that this wasn't acceptable. The factory boss said he was "working on it," by which we believe he meant that he was continuing to try to get his former salesperson to pay them back.
We told them that time was up and that we weren't going to negotiate with them any more.
Dear reader, we're desperately sorry to have to do this to you, but we can't yet tell you what happened next. We promise we will, eventually.
In our last backer update, we described a complicated "long con" scam by our factory's Director of International Sales. The core mechanism of the scam was modifying invoices to get us to pay into a bank account she controlled, rather than the company's official bank account. Somewhat atypically, she did actually turn around and pay some money to the factory, which is part of why it took us (and the factory) so long to catch on.
That isn't how these scams usually work.
This is.
In January, we were still working with the factory to get the Blank, Black and QWERTY keycap sets shipped. Jesse sent email to the factory's junior salesperson, CCed to their entire team, saying:
"Great. We're ready to pay ASAP. Please send the stamped invoice."
About 12 hours later, we got a reply saying "My boss is out of the office today, but I'll get you the stamped invoice tomorrow.
By the way, the government has closed our bank account due to an investigation of potential tax fraud. We need you to pay to a new bank account. I will send the details by return mail."
That reply was not CCed to anyone else at the factory.
Our immediate reaction was absolute shock at the brazenness of this attempted scam. Did the junior salesperson really think we were going to fall for this again? Was he in league with the former salesperson? Or did she have access to his email account?
Before we really thought about it, we replied asking him to please keep the factory's management team Cced on all messages and telling him that there was no way we'd pay to any account other than what was specified on the officially stamped invoice.
We immediately asked our project manager in Shenzhen to call the factory owner to tell him about this issue.
Unsurprisingly, the factory boss told us that there was nothing wrong with their bank account and that they were investigating internally.
It quickly became clear that this scam was perpetrated by a third party. What's more, we're willing to wager that the scammers' timing was just comically bad. How were they to know we were primed to be on the lookout for scams?
The factory's senior salesperson reported by WeChat that they'd received a different version of the message from the junior salesperson. The first half of the message was the same, but there was no mention of a bank account issue. As she looked more carefully at the message, she noticed that it wasn't actually sent to [email protected], but to a misspelling of our domain, something like [email protected]. When we looked at the mail we received, it wasn't from factory.com, but from a one-letter misspelling of the factory's domain, something like factroy.com. (We have changed the domain names. These are not the ones the scammer used.)
As we dug in, we discovered that the two domains had been registered about 12 hours apart on the day of the email exchange. Both of them appear to be hosted by the same hosting company in Germany. We suspect that if we dug further, we'd discover that everything was paid for with stolen credit cards.
Our best guess about the mechanics of what happened are that someone gained access to the junior salesperson's email account. They might have guessed his password. They might have exploited a vulnerability in Windows. They might have broken into the factory's ISP's mail server. This is something that could happen to anybody, anywhere. It's legitimately hard to defend against. We 100% do not blame the factory for this.
Once the attacker had access to a salesperson's email account, they probably set up filters looking for phrases like "pay ASAP" and "invoice" and just waited.
When they saw a good candidate email message, they put their plan into action.
Our suspicion is that as soon as they saw Jesse's email show up, they deleted the original, registered the domains needed for the attack and sent the new version of the email from [email protected].
Then they sat back and waited for the factory's junior salesperson to send a reply. Once he did, they copied the body of the message, added the note about bank account changes, and resent it from factroy.com. They also changed the phone numbers in the salesperson's signature by a single digit, which feels like a weird choice, since the new numbers aren't real and were more likely to lead to detection than just leaving the originals in place.
At this point, we were probably supposed to reply "Oh! Ok! I'm so sorry to hear about your bank account issue. Where should we send the money?"
We didn't.
Instead, we worked with the factory to make sure they understood what was going on, to get their passwords changed, and to make sure this wasn't happening to other customers.
It wasn't until a few days later that we realized we might learn a bit more about the scammers.
After discussing it internally, Jesse turned on an email CRM tool that keeps track of when and where email messages get opened and sent a reply to the scammer (at the factroy.com domain): "Hi! We really need to get this paid before Chinese New Year. I'm still waiting for the new bank information. Please send it right away."
We sat back to wait.
If the scammer was any good at what they do, they'd be using an email client that disables HTML email so the CRM tool wouldn't tell us anything.
Somewhat to our surprise, we didn't have long to wait. Just a few minutes later, the CRM tool showed that our email was opened.
In Lagos, Nigeria.
A few minutes later, the same email was opened in Taipei.
Our suspicion is that the scammer had simply not bothered to enable their VPN when reading email, but that when they saw they had somebody on the hook, they wanted to make things look as convincing as possible.
As promised, the scammer soon sent us the "new" Hong Kong bank account for the "factory".
Kaia did a bit of digging and found that the new bank account was tied to a Hong Kong company that had been set up just a few months earlier, presumably just for this kind of scam.
It should go without saying that we won't be sending them any money.
With strong signals that they're not located in China or the US, there's not a lot we can or should do to go after them. When we talked with our Chinese lawyer, she told us that this looked a lot more like a "normal" bank account fraud scam, and that it seemed really unlikely that there was any connection to what had happened to us before.
Other than a few hours of time untangling it, this particular scam didn't really cost us anything, but given the amount of work put in by the scammers, it must work some of the time.
So what's next?
While we can't talk more about what's going on with the old factory, the primary purpose of Jesse's trip to Taipei and Shenzhen was to find a new factory who will be a better partner for making the Model 01 in the future.
This time around, Jesse visited seven keyboard factories. Each and every one of them is producing keyboards for brands we know.
At least four of the seven produce keyboards we already own.
Three of the seven look like they might be good partners for us moving forward.
We're going to be careful as we figure out which one of them is going to be the best fit for us going forward.
There are still a lot of unknowns about how the transition to a new factory will work. If we can't pry our tooling free from our old factory, we may end up needing to have it remade. That's not going to be cheap, but it's an expense we expect to be able to afford.
We believe we can use this transition as an opportunity to make some design improvements to the Model 01. We're not yet quite ready to talk about those changes or the manufacturing schedule.
There's a very real possibility that we will sell out of our existing stock of Model 01s before production is up and running at the new factory. The downside of that is that the keyboard might be unavailable for some amount of time. The upside is that keeping inventory in the warehouse ties up a lot of a company's free cash, and every keyboard sold helps us make more keyboards.
Next time
Expect another backer update in early July. We’ve got some exciting software news coming up. There’s an outside chance we’ll have a little bit of product news, too.
<3
j+k
Day 1278: A startling discovery
over 5 years ago
– Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 01:33:36 AM
TL;DR: Due to serious financial misconduct at the factory that makes the Model 01, keycap sets that we believed were in the mail to you have yet to be shipped. We’re working to resolve the problem, but it may take us a while. The past few weeks have been stressful but Keyboardio is in good shape. Curious about what happened? Read on.
In happier news, the Model 01 is back in stock for immediate shipment at https://shop.keyboard.io
Words we never wanted to hear
"I'm not saying anything else without a lawyer present."
There's basically no situation in which these words indicate that things haven't gone badly, badly wrong.
These are the words someone says after they get caught.
These are the words that our account manager from the factory that makes the Model 01 said at about 6PM on Tuesday, November 27, after we'd finally figured out how much she’d stolen.
A backer update we never expected to write
A month ago, we were pretty sure that this backer update was going to be the last update about the Model 01. We thought we were going to be able to report that all the keycaps you've ordered had been shipped, and that most had already been received. We had thought that we were going to be able to report that our initial contract with our factory had been (mostly) successfully completed with the delivery of the MP7 shipment of keyboards, and that we were in discussions about whether to move production to a new supplier or to continue production with them now that we'd solved most of the manufacturing issues.
This is not that backer update. And we're pretty sure it won't be the last substantial backer update.
This is not a backer update that makes us look good. This is not a backer update that makes the factory look good.
This is not a backer update that makes our account manager look good.
This is a backer update that has been hard to write.
This is a backer update that includes details we're hesitant to share.
This is a backer update that doesn't include all the details we'd like to share.
The situation we're writing about is not yet resolved. It is unlikely that it will be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved. Before writing about this situation, we had to check with our lawyers. There is a chance that writing about this situation may influence the outcome, but we’ve decided that we’re willing to take that risk. From the start, we’ve tried to be as up-front with you as we can about the trials and tribulations about low-volume manufacturing in China. We’re not about to stop now.
Whatever the outcome of this situation, we still expect to honor all of our commitments to you.
Back to the beginning
One of the reasons we chose the factory we ended up using for the Model 01 was that the account manager seemed a little bit more engaged and collaborative than her peers at many of the other factories we met with. (In previous updates, we’ve sometimes referred to her as our “salesperson”, as that was the department she was in, although her role encompassed a lot more than that.) Her English was good. It seemed like she fought hard for what her customers wanted and that she was committed to managing the full production process. She told us that because the factory’s regular project management team didn’t speak English, she’d be our point-person throughout the manufacturing process. She seemed like a little bit of a control freak. It was nice that she was the "Director of Overseas Sales" and seemed to have significant pull inside the organization. In contrast, our sales contact at our second choice factory was so new and had so little internal influence that she couldn't get us even a single customer reference.
What we didn't know at the time was that our account manager had been with the company for only a few months, and that we were her first project with them.
We paid the initial deposit for the tooling and the keyboards directly to the factory and got started.
Right from the beginning, there were problems. The factory started making injection molding tooling before we'd approved the final design. That caused months of delays. The factory outsourced the injection molding to partners without telling us (despite assurances to the contrary in the contract). Small communications issues caused outsized delays. Throughout this process, our account manager kept in constant contact with us, to the point of nightly calls on both weekdays and weekends. We genuinely believed she was working hard on our behalf.
There were occasional "weird" things that felt like they might be lies, but every time we independently verified one of them, it checked out. As time went on, we talked to a lot of folks who’ve been manufacturing hardware in China. It became clear that small companies doing business in China just run into weird problems. However, if you've read our backer updates over the past few years, you will be well aware that we've run into more than our share of weird problems. In the words of one industry veteran we talked to, "every problem you guys have run into is something that happens. But nobody has all the problems."
It was only much later that we would realize how prescient this comment had been.
A new bank account
When it came time to pay for the first mass production run, our account manager sent us an invoice that included bank details that differed from those on the initial invoice. When we asked her about this, she said that the new account belonged to one of the factory's partners.
This is not entirely unheard of, but immediately set off alarm bells. We asked the account manager to confirm in writing that this change was 100% correct and above-board. When she did, Kaia forwarded this confirmation onward by email to the factory owner. The factory owner didn't get back to us and we were already desperately late to get these keyboards shipped. The total amount of the invoice was relatively small compared to the deposit we'd already paid the factory. And Jesse was physically present in China while this was happening. So we paid.
The keyboards shipped out.
We didn't think too much more about that alternate bank account because, well, all the right things appeared to happen.
Controlling the relationship
Unbeknownst to us, our account manager had gotten the factory to ship out our order of keyboards, even though they hadn't received any payment from us. Much later, we learned that she'd lied to the factory owner, telling him that we were broke and needed to sell that batch of keyboards before we could afford to pay for them. She held onto our money for a while and then paid it out to the factory.
This was how she started to poison the factory against us.
At around the same time, she started telling us about how poorly managed the factory was, but that she was running interference, solving problems on our behalf. At one point she told us about how gullible the factory owner was and that he got taken advantage of by his workers all the time.
If this were a novel, the foreshadowing would have been a little heavy-handed.
Over time, she told us lies about serious moral failings on the part of everybody at the factory we might approach to talk about the problems we were having. At the time, the things she said sounded believable. Much later, we'd realize that they were part of a plan to ensure that she was the trusted gatekeeper for all interactions between us and the factory.
When it came time to ship the second mass-production run of keyboards, Jesse had a meeting with our account manager and the factory owner in the factory's conference room. The first part of the meeting was in Chinese and then the factory owner had another commitment. After he left, the account manager told us that the project had been dragging out and the factory was out of pocket for raw materials, many of which had increased in price since we signed the contract. She said that the factory owner demanded we pay a little more up front and that this would reduce the amount we needed to pay for the remainder of the shipment. We're nice people who wanted to have a good relationship with our factory. And the money was going to the factory eventually. We knew that the bit about raw materials getting more expensive was true—China’s been on a major anti-pollution kick, which has caused a lot of prices to spike. All in all, it felt a little bit funny, but we agreed.
You can probably guess most of what happened next. The account manager held onto all of our money for as long as she possibly could. When we started to get frantic about shipping, she paid the factory owner just enough money to convince him to release the shipment. When we met a couple weeks ago, the factory owner said that she paid this money in Chinese RMB. When he expressed concern about this, since we'd agreed to pay in US Dollars, she told him that, again, we were broke. She said that she was loaning us the money for this shipment, so we could try to recover our business.
Similar situations played out for subsequent shipments of keyboards. To us, the factory seemed moderately incompetent and disorganized. To the factory, we seemed like a small-time deadbeat client who might never make good on their promises to pay.
Over the course of 2017, Jesse made several extended trips to Shenzhen to work with the factory to solve a variety of design, manufacturing, and supply chain issues. When he was on the ground at the factory, issues got solved far faster, but that itself wasn’t a huge red flag. Our relationship with the account manager seemed pretty good.Before one of the trips, she asked if Jesse could bring American prenatal vitamins, as she and her husband were trying to have a baby. She even commissioned a portrait of our son from an artist at the famous Dafen Artist Village in Shenzhen. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, while she sent us photos of the portrait, she never sent the actual portrait.)
Sometime in 2018, the account manager started telling us that she was planning to quit working for the factory once our project was over. She said that she'd actually started a factory with some partners and that they were already making mice and planned to expand to keyboards in the near future. She even tried to get us interested in investing in her new factory.
Pushing things too far
Keyboard shipments in 2018 happened. They weren't on time. They were not without issues. But they happened. Well, up until we got to the MP6 shipment, which was supposed to happen at the end of August. The account manager told us that due to scheduling issues, they wouldn't start assembly until early September. And then things kept dragging out by days and weeks. Finally in the middle of October, the account manager told us that we would need to prepay for MP6 and MP7 or the factory would refuse to complete the assembly.
Jesse actually came close to getting on a plane at this point, but we had some unmoveable family commitments and already had a trip to Shenzhen on the books in December to talk to factories about our next product.
We figured that this was part of a ploy on the part of the factory to get us to break the contract, so they could quit. Jesse told the account manager this. She swore that she would not quit her job at the factory until this project was successfully delivered.
We were upset. This was a straight up violation of the contract and of normal standards of business. The account manager told us that the factory was having cashflow issues and that if we didn't prepay, there was no way we were getting our keyboards. Since we had over 100 customers who'd bought these keyboards when we'd been promising that they'd ship in August or September, we bit the bullet and agreed to pay for MP6 before delivery. MP7 would complete our order with the factory. We said we couldn't possibly pay in full, as we'd have zero leverage if the factory failed to deliver. The account manager took a day to "negotiate" with the factory and said she'd gotten them to agree to accept half of the remaining amount due as a gesture of good faith. She wrote into the payment agreement that the factory would return the payments if they did not hit the committed delivery dates.
When we paid this money, we knew the MP6 keyboards existed—we'd already had our third-party quality control agent check both the assembly line and the assembled keyboards. On October 26th or so, our account manager committed to get the keyboards shipped out ASAP. That should mean that keyboards arrive in Hong Kong the same day they were shipped. More typically, that means that keyboards will arrive at our warehouse in Hong Kong within 48-72 hours. Three days later, they still weren't there.
Our account manager said that she was in Malaysia and would dig into it when she was back in town in a couple days. She told us that she'd visited the trucking company and that they'd agreed to expedite our shipment. Two days later, the keyboards still hadn't arrived.
We were flipping out. We had daily calls with our account manager explaining just how bad it would be if these keyboards didn't arrive at our warehouse before Black Friday. She told us that she understood entirely and that she promised that the factory would compensate us USD1000 per day for every day they were late, going all the way back to October.
Over the course of 3 weeks, excuses included:
The factory has not paid their bill with the shipping agent, so all of the goods shipped by the factory have been impounded
Two of the factory’s biggest customers didn’t pay their bills, so the factory hasn’t met their contractual minimums and the shipping agent won’t do anything until this is resolved
The shipping agent has agreed to ship your keyboards, but they're fully booked up today
Your keyboards are on a truck! The truck is in Hong Kong. But it will arrive after the warehouse closes. (In this case, our account manager called the warehouse and got their staff to wait around for a couple hours after work.)
The factory has taken the keyboards back from the trucking agent because they're incompetent. They need to redo the customs paperwork and then send them to a new trucking company.
The new trucking company hadn't finalized their contract with the factory so refused to send the goods to Hong Kong
The new trucking company has handed the goods off to their Hong Kong partner. They will be delivered tomorrow morning.
A conversation with the factory owner
"Tomorrow morning" was, by now, the day before Thanksgiving. This was beyond the pale. We were absolutely livid. It was clear that something was very wrong, though we couldn’t begin to guess at the magnitude of the problem. We sent our on-the-ground manufacturing consultant to the factory to meet with the factory owner, without our account manager present. The factory owner was angry, too. The conversation went something like this:
"Why the heck haven't Keyboardio's keyboards been delivered?"
“I've told the account manager over and over: Those keyboards will never leave our warehouse before Keyboardio pays for them.”
"But Keyboardio has paid for them. Here are the wire transfer confirmations."
“Well, we haven't received any of the last four payments.”
“What about the 5000 sets of keycaps Keyboardio ordered?”
‘You mean the 2700 sets they ordered? They’re ready, as soon as they pay for them…”
"It sounds like there's a big problem."
“Yes, it sounds like there's a big problem. We've not received at least USD30,000 that Keyboardio think they've paid.”
Our manufacturing consultant reported all of this to us while we were in the middle of hosting Thanksgiving dinner.
He also shared an additional anecdote with us: The account manager had apparently been notorious for borrowing money (up to around USD1000 at a time) from coworkers and had been spotty about paying them back on time. The problem had become so bad that the factory owner had forbidden his staff from loaning her money. (To this day, she still owes at least one of them.)
36 hours later, Jesse was on the way to the airport, en route to Shenzhen.
Unravelling the scam
Monday morning, Jesse and our manufacturing consultant were due to meet with the factory owner, but he wasn't answering his phone. The account manager told us that she was unavailable until the afternoon, as she had to go visit the factory working making replacements for the keycaps that “got lost in the mail” again. (More on that later.)
After lunch, Jesse and the manufacturing consultant showed up at the factory to find the factory owner in the middle of a heated conversation. The manufacturing consultant told Jesse that they were discussing commission. The account manager was asserting that they'd had an oral agreement about her commission (as a percentage of factory profit.)
That's when we learned that she was no longer an employee of the factory. Remember how we said she’d promised not to quit until this project was finished? That was a lie. It turns out she'd quit 18 months prior. The factory had allowed her to keep our project as an independent "sales agent." This, at least, is not uncommon when doing business in China. What did surprise us was that the account manager had kept such tight control of our account that other people at the factory were afraid of angering her by speaking to us directly. The last time Jesse had been in Shenzhen, the factory owner had tried (unbeknownst to us) to take Jesse to lunch. Our account manager had refused to allow it. Folks at the factory said that they were worried that any direct contact with us would be seen as trying to steal her client.
During the first day of meetings, the account manager agreed to pay the remainder due to ship the MP6 keyboards on Tuesday morning, and that Jesse could come to the factory on Wednesday morning to watch them depart for Hong Kong on a truck.
Throughout the first day of meetings, all of the discussion of fraud and embezzlement was in Chinese. Eventually, the account manager left, supposedly to go arrange payment.
When Jesse discussed this with the factory team with the account manager out of the room, they told him that they were trying to allow her to save face, as they thought this was the most likely way to recover the stolen money.
Lies all the way down
On Tuesday morning, Jesse and our manufacturing consultant sat down with the factory's management team to discuss what had really happened and what needed to happen going forward. The first thing they did was to compare, in detail, what we'd paid and what the factory had received. The discrepancy wasn't USD30,000. It was over USD100,000.
We started looking at how the number could have gotten so big.
Part of it was the amounts the account manager had told us we needed to prepay, which she pocketed.
Part of it was the order for 5000 sets of keycaps we'd placed in January (along with shipping costs for 2700 sets that the factory was supposed to send directly to you.) As it turned out, she'd doctored the invoices she sent to us and to the factory. She'd dramatically inflated the unit cost of the keycaps and associated packaging on the invoice presented to us. At the same time, she'd halved the size of the order she sent to the factory. And those keycaps that the factory shipped out in August and October? They simply never existed. Total fabrication. At this point, Jesse took a break to walk into the factory's warehouse, where he found pallets of thousands of QWERTY, Unpainted, and Black keycap sets literally gathering dust. They'd been sitting there for months. The factory said they needed to get paid before they'd release the keycaps.
And, it turns out, part of the discrepancy was due to the fact that the account manager had negotiated aggressive discounts and price breaks on "our" behalf and not passed them on to us.
When we asked if our account manager had done this to any of her other clients, the factory owner told us that we were the only customer she’d brought in before she’d quit.
Having come to understand the scale of the fraud, we told the factory that we were worried that she might try to disappear. We asked if someone at the factory could call her husband to see if he could tell us what was going on. That resulted in some pretty confused looks from the factory team.
“She’s single. She’s never been married.”
It turns out she’d lied about that, too.
At this point, we were pretty sure that nobody was ever going to see our account manager again. Boy were we surprised when the account manager agreed to show up at the factory to continue our discussions that afternoon.
You're probably asking yourself "why didn't they call the police?" Jesse was asking himself the same thing. When he asked the factory team the same question, their response was both understandable and somewhat unsatisfying: "It's not enough money to destroy her life over. We think we can solve this without the police."
It all got pretty weird. The factory owner posted guards at the factory's front gate to make sure that she didn't simply walk out and disappear. At one point, Jesse found himself standing in a dark stairwell to make sure she didn't sneak out the back when she said she had to go to the toilet.
Tuesday afternoon's discussions were...somewhat more frank. Jesse was very clear with the account manager that he knew she had been lying about everything from the beginning and that he did not believe she still had the money. He asked her to prove it by showing bank balances to him or the team at the factory. She claimed that her Hong Kong account had been "blocked" due to an issue with the bank. Astonishingly, most of the people in the room seemed to take both this explanation and the claim that she was withholding the money as a bargaining tactic about her commission at face value.
A couple times during the afternoon, while arguing with the factory owner, the account manager called a friend or compatriot of some kind to get "advice" about the negotiation.
(In the end, MP6 did ship: she paid about half of the required amount on Wednesday, half on Thursday, the truck shipped out on Thursday afternoon, and the keyboards got to the warehouse on Friday afternoon. As of this writing, they’re currently in stock at https://shop.keyboard.io/)
Lawyering up
Wednesday morning, Jesse met with our new lawyer to discuss our options. He told her that we'd like to resolve the situation by making sure that the theft was an internal matter between the factory and their former employee and that we'd like to maintain good relations with the factory. The lawyer explained that we could pursue both civil and criminal options, but that the civil option was more likely to lead to a positive resolution, wherein the money was recovered and our relationship with the factory was preserved. She said that the criminal penalty for what our account manager had done ranged from ten years to life in prison. She said that as soon as we called the police, the account manager would be unable to travel internationally or to buy plane or train tickets. More importantly, she said that once the police were involved, they'd have full control of the investigation and that there'd be very little we could do to get an outcome we wanted. She did agree that it was our ultimate fallback and that it was important that the account manager be aware of how severe the penalties for her actions are.
Wednesday afternoon, Jesse contacted our wood supplier to make sure that he didn’t engage with our account manager. When Jesse told him a bit about what was going on, he revealed that a couple months back, our account manager had called him up to say that she was travelling internationally, had lost her wallet and needed him to loan her some money so that she could get a flight home. When Jesse asked if he’d paid, the wood supplier said that he told her that it was wildly inappropriate to be asking a suppliers for personal loans, and that she ought to ask a close friend or family member instead. He may be the only person in this whole story who didn’t get conned by our account manager.
Thursday, Jesse, our lawyer, the factory owner, and the account manager sat down at the factory to hash out a new legal agreement between all the parties. Everyone agreed that we had paid everything we thought we had. The account manager confirmed in writing that she had received all the money we sent and agreed to repay it to the factory. Everyone agreed about the products (and quantities) we've ordered. We agreed to new delivery dates for everything that hasn't yet shipped. The factory agreed in writing that we own all the tooling we've paid for and that they will make it available for us to move to another factory if we want to.
The meeting didn't come to quite the resolution we'd hoped it would, but it turned out dramatically better than it might have.
Our lawyer has advised us not to go into more detail about the rest of the agreement or the shipping and delivery schedule we agreed to. At this point, we need to let things play out a bit more. We expect to have an update on keycaps and MP7 by mid-January at latest.
A new beginning
Saturday, Jesse and our manufacturing consultant sat down with the factory team. We knew our account manager had tightly controlled all information about the Model 01, so we wanted to make sure they had all the details they'd need to finish the work they've agreed to.
What we found...probably shouldn't have shocked us. In August, we'd sent 20 defective circuit boards back to our account manager at the factory, so she could give them to the engineering team to study and improve future production runs. In September, she'd confirmed receipt and said that the engineering team had been studying the failures. Nobody at the factory had heard anything about this. Jesse went strolling through the warehouse to find where everything from the account manager's office had been shelved. There was our box of defective circuit boards. Unopened. Jesse physically handed them to the manager of the R&D department.
We talked about the kinds of problems we'd seen in the field with the Model 01. Jesse was trying to reassure the factory when he told them that we weren't going to hold them responsible for the 100 defective wooden enclosures from the first mass production run, and that we understood that the problems for that, at least, mostly rested with the original supplier. This all had the opposite effect of what Jesse had intended. It turns out that the account manager had never bothered to tell the factory management about the defective enclosures, either.
It became clear that just about every conversation she’d reported having with the factory on our behalf over the past 18 months had been a total fabrication.
Finally we got to the point of talking about the future. Jesse explained that a few weeks before, Keyboardio had been dead-set on moving production to a new factory as soon as the keyboards we'd paid for were shipped. Now that we had a better understanding of what's going on, he said, we're happy to treat this as an opportunity to reboot the relationship. So long as the new agreement is honored and things ship on schedule, we effectively have changed factories.
Our account manager was a poor project manager and a poor salesperson, but she was a pretty skilled con-artist. It's not 100% clear if it would have protected us in this instance, but we've now learned (the hard way) that one should never pay an invoice from a Chinese company unless it's been stamped with the company's official "chop" or seal.
Going forward, our new account manager at the factory has asked that all correspondence be CC’ed to the factory owner, the factory's CFO, her, the junior sales assistant, Jesse, Kaia, and our manufacturing consultant. Similarly, when discussing things on WeChat, we should use a group chat where everybody sees everything. Most importantly (to everybody), future payments, if any, should only ever be to the factory's primary bank account. And that we never again pay an un-stamped invoice.
Where we are today
So, that's most of what's new with us.
Is this catastrophically bad news? Yes and no.
On the one hand, there's a lot of money missing. We think there's a decent chance that money has vanished never to be seen again. Products that we said we sent you...simply never existed. We're genuinely sorry about that.
And of course it never feels good to realize that you got scammed.
On the other hand, Kaia pointed out to Jesse the other night that this actually makes her more confident about our ability to manufacture products in China in the future. When that industry veteran told us that all of these problems never happen to the same company, it turns out that they were right. All those uncontrollably crazy problems and delays we had? While many of them had a grain of truth, the vast majority of the issues we thought we had.. simply didn't exist. And, indeed, when we’ve worked directly with other suppliers for replacement wooden enclosures, travel cases for the Model 01, and on other bits and pieces, everything has gone a good deal more smoothly.
We're hopeful that we have a stronger, better relationship with the factory than we've had in the past. If worst happens and the new agreement with the factory falls apart, we're still potentially out a lot of money, but it's not enough money to kill the company. The part of the agreement that says we own all the tooling for the Model 01 has the force of law. (And yes, it's stamped with the corporate seal.) We are, of course, hoping that everything works out with our current factory, but if we need to, we can to move the tooling to a new factory, and to produce and ship your keycaps and more Model 01s.
A bit of good news
Oh. We do have a little bit of good news. The company that's making the Model 01 travel cases finished the second production run of cases a couple weeks early. We reported to them that one case from the first production run had a stitching error, so they threw in 10 extra cases, just in case any other issues get discovered. This second production run of travel cases arrived at our Hong Kong warehouse on Tuesday. On Thursday, we asked the warehouse to ship out cases to every Kickstarter backer who’s filled out the backer survey. We expect most of them to arrive on your doorsteps before the end of 2018. In the coming weeks, we'll make cases available for sale on https://shop.keyboard.io.
We also have several hundred Model 01s in stock at our warehouse in Hong Kong. Orders should ship out within 2 business days.
Before commenting on this update
As we wrote at the start of this update, it contains some sensitive information and we're a little hesitant about posting it. In order to be able to post this publicly, we've got to set a few ground rules.
It's perfectly ok to post comments telling us that we were naive and too trusting. We're well aware.
Please do NOT post any comments or speculation about the identity of our account manager or factory or their motivations. Doing so may limit our ability to share details with you in the future. And we really want to be able to share details with you in the future.
<3 Jesse + Kaia
Model 01 case Quickstarter launch!
over 5 years ago
– Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 08:55:59 PM
Hello from Oakland,
We're pleased to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for the Model 01 travel case will go live at noon Pacific time today (less than an hour!). The campaign will run for two weeks.
There are 400 cases available from the first production run, which should ship in January. When those sell out, we'll add an option to buy a case from the second production run.
<3 Jesse + Kaia
p.s. we'll send just one more email about the case campaign, shortly before it closes
Day 1216: In which a record-setting typhoon is basically a footnote
over 5 years ago
– Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 02:03:01 AM
Hello from Oakland,
It’s been a few months since we last wrote, and lots has been happening! We've delivered (almost) all of the keyboards that had been preordered, had a couple hundred keyboards in stock, run out of stock, and started taking backorders for additional keyboards. We also have a bit of news about a travel case for the Model 01 and a mysterious teaser about our next product.
Model 01 Hardware News
Inventory
With the exception of about five folks we haven't been able to track down and some of the folks who ordered Mahogany Model 01s, we believe we've now offered a Model 01 to everybody who preordered one.
As of this writing, the Model 01 is out of stock. We managed to keep keyboards in stock for almost two months, running out on August 22. The next shipment from the factory is due at our warehouse in Hong Kong within a couple weeks. The factory had previously committed to having them ready by this weekend, but told us that they’re running behind because fewer workers than expected came back from the National Day holiday. As of now, they believe that they’ll have enough units to fulfill backorders ready for inspection by the 19th and the rest of the batch done by the end of the month.
Keycap sets
This has become a big of a saga. Strap in, folks.
The factory assured us many months ago that the additional sets of keycaps they owed us (and you) would be in the mail within a few weeks. That turned out not to be the case.
The injection molding factory produced an entire run of replacement keycaps a few months ago. They were painted, UV-coated and some of them were laser engraved before being delivered to our factory for final QC. When the factory started to check the keycaps, they discovered that the paint simply wasn't adhering to the keycaps. Numerous theories about what could possibly have gone wrong were proposed to us. Eventually, we asked the factory to confirm that the injection-molding supplier hadn't accidentally or intentionally changed the type of plastic they were using for our keycaps. The next day, the factory confirmed to us that the problem was that the injection-molding supplier had... changed the plastic they were using to make our keycaps.
The entire production run of keycaps was destroyed at the supplier's expense.
After that, they made the entire run again. The factory rejected that run because the keycaps had various discolorations. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal because the keycaps were being painted. However, ordinarily, an injection molding supplier is able to injection-mold plastic without discolorations.
The entire production run of keycaps was destroyed at the supplier's expense.
The supplier blamed the painting jigs they'd designed for the discoloration issues, so they redesigned them and tried again.
After that, they made the entire run again. The factory rejected that run because the keycaps had various discolorations. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal because the keycaps were being painted. However, ordinarily, an injection molding supplier is able to injection-mold plastic without discolorations.
The entire production run of keycaps was destroyed at the supplier's expense.
Author's note: The previous paragraphs were repeated verbatim because the production problem happened twice. In total, the entire run was destroyed and remade three times, with a delay of several weeks between runs.
After that, our factory sent an engineer to babysit the production process. They watched as the injection-molding supplier cleaned out their molding machine and finally started producing workable parts.
For cost reasons, we decided to have the factory arrange shipping of keycaps directly from Shenzhen. After some fairly significant back and forth, the factory recommended a local shipping agent who was willing to handle a few thousand sets of keycaps going out to more than 30 different countries. They offered us a decent shipping rate and cautioned us that shipping this way wouldn't get detailed tracking and could take 2-3 weeks. They told us that we had to buy insurance at what we thought was a slightly high rate of 5% of the cost of the goods. They told us that if any of the keycaps didn't arrive in a month, the shipping agent would pay to have the keycaps remanufactured and resent. At that rate, we'd have been better off self-insuring unless more than 1 in 20 packages got lost. Given how unlikely that sounded, we were a little bit annoyed.
On August 17, the factory confirmed to us that all preordered sets of QWERTY keycaps, all blank black keycaps and about half of the preordered sets of unpainted keycaps had been mailed out.
As of this writing, not a single set of keycaps has been received.
Last Friday, our factory rep met with the shipping company, who said that it was their fault, apologized and said they would take responsibility for remanufacturing and reshipping the entire order. As best we understand it, the shipping agent taped and labeled a few thousand sets of keycaps, paid the postage on them, accidentally put them back into the master cartons they arrived in from the factory and then... misplaced them. There are so many things about this that don't make sense, but that's the best information we have.
Pallets of boxed keycaps... last known photo
After telling us that engraving was in process about six weeks ago, the factory told us they finally have all the keycap sets QC checked, packaged and ready to send to the shipping company.
Thursday, we sent email to everybody who ordered Dvorak, Colemak or Linear A keycaps to double-check your shipping addresses before the factory hands them off to the shipping company.
The runic / Linear A keycaps look good
Later on Thursday, the factory sent us the final proof photos of packaged Colemak, Dvorak and Linear A keycaps packaged up and ready to go. We noticed that the “Space” label on the Colemak set was misprinted and asked the factory if that was a one-off error. Four hours later, they said they’d checked enough sets to decide that it was a widespread problem and that they were having the sets (or possibly just the Space keys) remade again. The factory says they’re going to start the injection molding today, send the new keys to the paint and laser shop on Monday, and that if all goes well, the corrected keysets will be ready in about a week and a half.
The Dvorak and Colemak sets are almost good, but once you see the "space" misalignment you'll never be able to un-see it
Barring another catastrophe, all the blank black, unpainted, QWERTY and Linear A sets will be delivered to the factory’s shipping partner on Tuesday for labeling and handoff to China Post. Our factory’s sales person has promised to personally oversee the handover to the postal service.
A record-breaking typhoon interrupted production for a few days, but somehow that ended up being a footnote despite looking like this:
Yeah.
Mahogany keyboards
During the Kickstarter campaign, we offered a few special edition units with a mahogany enclosure. The keyboards have the same keycaps and electronics. The only difference is a fancy enclosure. We originally expected to be able to deliver the Mahogany keyboards early, since it’d be a much smaller batch. That didn’t happen. We weren’t happy with our ability to get the fit and finish right ourselves in our home shop. Our first few wood suppliers in China weren’t willing to do a very short run with a “special” wood, and we ran into some literal translation issues with “mahogany.” In the U.S., “mahogany” can refer to several different species from the same family. In China, only Swietenia wood from South America seems to be sold as mahogany.
Oddly enough, we had multiple suppliers try to convince us to switch to Brazilian Rosewood. Brazilian Rosewood is very, very nice. They used to use it for Eames chairs. They used to use it for lots of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that it’s now endangered and trafficking in it is a crime. At one point, we got curious and asked a supplier if they could give us paperwork for this “Brazilian Rosewood.” The next morning, they sent us full sourcing paperwork for several containers of the “Brazilian Rosewood” they wanted to sell us. The paperwork identified it as Bubinga from Africa. When we pressed them, the supplier said that in China, Bubinga is sold as Brazilian Rosewood. We tried to explain to them that they might not want to be advertising that they were trafficking in endangered wood when they weren’t, but ultimately don’t think they believed us.
The good news is we’ve eventually managed to explain ourselves with one of our newer wood suppliers. They’ve now delivered to us fifteen absolutely gorgeous enclosures made from sapele, a beautiful African “true mahogany” wood that’s more sustainably grown than its Latin American cousins.
We're now in the process of checking and individually numbering the Kickstarter Limited Edition sets, and are starting to reach out to the folks to whom we owe them to arrange shipping.
Replacement wooden enclosures
A handful of people were shipped keyboards in wooden enclosures that shouldn’t have gotten through our QC process (wood warped or cracked, or the finish on the wood really poorly done).
It took us a while to get good-quality enclosures in stock to do warranty replacements, but over the last month we finally got there. Our newest wood supplier delivered a batch of good-quality enclosures to us in the U.S., and we’ve been checking them and boxing them up. In general, we think they’re amongst the nicest enclosures we’ve seen. We’ll be continuing to work with this supplier going forward.
Doing warranty replacements from home means we get to order person-sized rolls of bubble wrap
We believe we’ve reached out to everyone who has told us they need a replacement enclosure. In case you haven’t gotten back to us yet: if we owe you a warranty replacement enclosure, we need to double-check your shipping addresses and make sure we’ve correctly captured what went wrong with your current enclosure. If you’re expecting a replacement enclosure, please fill out this Google Form:
Since we’re collecting photos, Google requires a google account to fill in that form. If you don’t have a Google account, this form is the same, minus the “send us a picture” question:
If you use that second form, we may need to check in with you to confirm the issue before sending the replacement.
Join us on Discord
Over the past few months, the Keyboardio IRC channel, like much of the Freenode IRC network, has been overrun by spammers, making the channel almost completely unusable. Consequently, we've moved real-time discussion over to Discord. If you're not familiar with Discord, you can think of it as "Slack for communities", with a historical focus on gamers. It has a mobile UI, as well as pretty, modern GUI clients for desktop and mobile operating systems.
Discord is the right place for real-time chat about Keyboardio, Kaleidoscope, and the Model 01.
If you'd like to join us on Discord, this link will let you sign up: https://discord.gg/4az77sf
While we do our best to help out with Keyboardio-related issues anywhere you can find us, our official support channel is still [email protected].
Software and firmware
Kaleidoscope
The past few months have seen a fair amount of work on Kaleidoscope. For us, the biggest is that we’ve finally moved to the new plugin system designed by noseglasses. The "exciting" thing about the plugin system is that it's now much easier for Kaleidoscope plugins to do more stuff and to use fewer of the controller's limited resources while doing them. This means that Kaleidoscope can run just a bit faster and more efficiently and that you now have a more free space on the microcontroller for layouts, LED effects, and things like that.
This change did require us to rejigger how Model 01 firmware "sketches" work. We've tried to include good error messages about what you need to do as you update your firmware and have posted additional details on the forums. If you run into trouble, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].
We've squashed dozens of bugs and made numerous other changes and improvements under the hood since the last release of Kaleidoscope, too. In particular, we believe we've solved issues some folks were seeing when pressing and releasing bracket keys quickly, as well as a bunch of numpad and BIOS interaction issues.
The next thing coming down the line for Kaleidoscope is the ability to update your keyboard layout without having to compile firmware or 'flash' the keyboard yourself.
Chrysalis
The desktop app that you'll use to customize your Model 01 is called Chrysalis.
The first version of Chrysalis was mostly complete over a year ago, but it was both brittle and written in.... Clojurescript, which isn't widely used. Over the summer, we ended up making the decision to start from scratch. Throwing away something that's close to working is never fun, but it had become clear that Chrysalis would always be hard to build unless we started over, building a React app in an Electron shell.
algernon and Jesse (but mostly algernon) have just updated Kaleidoscope's support for storing key layouts in EEPROM. (EEPROM is essentially a tiny, tiny 1000 byte SSD inside the keyboard.) At the same time, algernon has rebuilt Focus, the serial control protocol for Kaleidoscope. (Focus is the bit that lets a program on your computer talk to the keyboard.) These two bits were the last of the code that needs to run on the keyboard to support Chrysalis.
The new version of Chrysalis lives at https://github.com/keyboardio/chrysalis-bundle-keyboardio. As of now, it starts up, detects a keyboard and can read and write keymaps. It's not at the point where it's pretty or user friendly, but it's finally a solid base to build on top of.
At the same time, Simon-Claudius has been working with the folks at Dygma to prototype what a version of Chrysalis themed for their keyboard, the Raise, might look like. You can see their demo video here.
We're hoping to be able to release a first working alpha of Chrysalis in the next couple months.
Software ports
Since we last wrote, Kaleidoscope has been 'ported' to run on a few keyboards we didn't create. If you have an Ergodox EZ or an Atreus by Technomancy and have Kaleidoscope 1.92 or later installed in the Arduino IDE, you should be able to select your keyboard in the "Boards" menu and flash Kaleidoscope onto your keyboard. We're not currently able to provide commercial support for Kaleidoscope on hardware we didn't make, but if you're interested in the details of the ports, you can find them on GitHub for both the ErgoDox EZ and Atreus.
If you're interested in porting Kaleidoscope to another keyboard, join us in #kaleidoscope-dev on Discord and we'd be thrilled to talk about it.
Kaleidoscope is, of course, not the only opensource keyboard firmware out there. Another popular and featureful option is called QMK. The QMK project has wide hardware support, but somewhat different goals than Kaleidoscope. Last month, James Laird-Wah added support for the Model 01 to QMK. You can read more about it here: https://community.keyboard.io/t/qmk-ported-to-model01/2015
Kaleidoscope Plugins
In the past few months, we've seen a few new community-created Kaleidoscope Plugins
In the past couple months, we've seen two completely different approaches to adding Emoji support to Kaleidoscope. The first, from Burke Libbey, is a technique for creating a Slack-specific Emoji keymap layer using Kaleidoscope Macros. You can find Burke's implementation here: https://github.com/burke/Model01-Firmware/blob/master/Model01-Firmware.ino
Jochen Pfeiffer went in a slightly different direction. Building on Kaleidoscope's core Unicode support, he created Kaleidoscope-Emoji, a plugin that makes it easier to type Emoji into any app. You can find his plugin here: https://github.com/jjochen/Kaleidoscope-Emoji
Future Keyboardio products
Why we stopped selling "loud-click" Model 01s.
We recently stopped offering the "loud-click" version of the Model 01. A few folks have asked us whether we expect to stock them again in the future. As of now, we don't expect to stock a loud-click version of the Model 01 again.
The reason we made the (surprisingly difficult decision) to discontinue the loud-click Model 01 was that a significant minority of the folks who got them reported that they found some keys hard to press. Initially, we couldn't reproduce the problem folks were describing, but eventually we figured out what was going on using our handy-dandy digital force meter.
After we completed the design of the Model 01, our keyswitch vendor redesigned their switches to reduce what's called "wobble." The stems of classic Matias switches have a fair amount of back-and-forth play as they're pressed down. Matias figured out a way to tighten up the keyswitch tolerances to reduce wobble and to provide what most folks say is a cleaner feeling keyswitch. On most keyboards, this worked out just great. On the Model 01, however, it worked out less great. Because on a Model 01 you are not moving your hands as much as on a traditional layout, some people’s hands end up hitting the keyswitch at a bit of an angle, which causes the new sliders to bind against the edge of the switch and the clickleaf.
Once we understood the theory of what was going wrong, we were able to measure the increased force of hitting a loud-click Matias switch at an off-angle. Instead of requiring about 55 grams of force to press, the required pressure spiked to over 100 grams. (The quiet-click switches have a slightly different design, which is largely immune to this issue.) We tried a bunch of lubricants. None made any significant difference. We discussed the issue with Matias. As of now, their best solution would be a redesign of the Model 01 to rotate all of the keyswitches 90 degrees. This issue is something we'll keep in mind when we eventually revise the Model 01.
Unfortunately, the change suggested by Matias would require new circuit boards, new aluminum keyplates, and new keycap tooling; this makes it cost prohibitive for us to do just for the sake of offering loud keyswitches.
Travel cases
One of the most frequent questions we get about accessories for the Model 01 is whether there's a travel case we recommend for the Model 01. Until now, the best answers have included laptop cases or keeping one Model 01 at home and another at work.
We're pleased to report that we've completed the design of the Model 01 travel case. Our manufacturing partner (who have nothing whatsoever to do with our keyboard factory) expects to finish assembly of the first batch of cases by the end of October. That means that it's time for us to start selling the new case. We're planning to run a "quickstarter" (a short 3 week Kickstarter campaign) to sell the first batch cases. At some point after that, we'll make them available from https://shop.keyboard.io.
As of now, we're planning to sell the case for about $35 + shipping from our Hong Kong warehouse.
Before we launch the campaign, we need to take some nice pictures of the final sample, record a video and double check our shipping pricing. To tide you over, here are a couple of quick cameraphone pictures:
We’ll send a short email update or two when the Quickstarter launches.
The next keyboard
We know what keyboard we're going to make next, though we aren't quite ready to show the world. Some aspects of the design have been kicking around in our heads for the past couple years, and some early prototypes have been collecting dust for almost as long. However, as we've finally gotten to turn some attention to the new keyboard, things have been coming together nicely over the past month.
It’s not so much a successor to the Model 01 as a keyboard that fits in a slightly different niche. You may even want both :)
We've been posting work-in-progress teasers about the industrial design to Twitter. This is what it might look like with the top cover on:
(it probably won't be purple)
After we do a little bit more design and testing, it'll be time for Jesse to get back on a plane to Shenzhen to visit potential manufacturing partners. Once we're all set to make the keyboard, it'll be time to spin up the Kickstarter hype machine again.
