How to make an exotic keyboard

If you have an exotic goal, you will go to somewhere exotic. If not, you will stay in a comfortable, familiar place.

The most non-exotic, comfortable, familiar goal is, for sure, money. As far as your goal is money, your product never become exotic, and you wouldn't care about that because you just want to give your product an exotic look. We are very familiar with such fake products. Good luck.

Typing speed competition is an exotic goal. But I think it is a bad bet. Typing speed depends heavily on adaptation. It is inevitable that your product will end up resembling laptop keyboards. In other words, buy the Apple Magic Keyboard.

On the contrary, industrial special-purpose is a promised bet. The photo below was taken in 1970. Look at the left bottom. This is an industrial special-purpose keyboard (The keyboard is for CAD).

BTW in Japan, the descendant of the keyboard was alive until 2024. The final model was USB:

This is a promised bet, but... Such a chance is rare. Nowadays touchscreens make it more rare.

I mentioned about adaptation above. In the first place, why are we so used to laptop keyboards? The answer is the ecosystem. Sometimes we can choose programming languages. Each of programming languages has its own ecosystem, i.e. CPAN or PyPI. Sometimes no choice. C is the only option in many cases. Hardware is much more no choice because it is bound to physics. We cannot make vacuum compressed physical keyboards! (There is an exception.) Moreover, volume efficiency matters. Many exotic programming languages are free because we don't need expensive molds for copying their toolset. About exotic keyboards, for example, I paid more than 10,000 USD for the molds for Nanaju, therefore its unit price is 600 USD. You can get free 3D model of Nanaju under MIT license because we don't need expensive molds for copying a Blender file. In the ecosystem, namely in the kingdoms of Apple or Microsoft, no one cares just 10,000 USD of mold cost because their production volume is a figure in the millions. Thus we have no choice, thus we don't call the ecosystem "the ecosystem", just buy Macbook or Surface, and adapt to them.

BTW the vacuum compressed physical keyboard:

Now we are ready to imagine a Copernican revolution. Making a miniature ecosystem, just like a miniature garden! We cannot live in the miniature ecosystem, but it makes possible to materialize radically exotic things. The computer architecture, the paradigm of toolset, the usage of screens, etc, etc. Niklaus Wirth made it as an academic study, Project Oberon. This is another promised bet and doesn't require a rare chance.

As you know, this, too, is not the way of Nanaju.

I am a revolutionist. A revolution is not a story about transfer of power. An Afghan said that "A goat stands up and a water buffalo sits down." No, this is not a revolution. Gaining a different perspective on what rules over us, this is a revolution. Karl Marx wrote a ton about the capitalism and little about the communism. He never made a miniature garden.

The goal of Nanaju is our living.

Please remember the first 60% PC keyboard in the history, Macintosh 128K M0110. Why was it made so small? Because the desk area is finite and the users were only supposed to use the Mac for a small amount of desk work. This concern is even more significant today. This is the goal of Nanaju too.

So far, this goal doesn't seem all that exotic. Now the twist comes in: Coordinating with the software ecosystem, but ignoring everything else (as far as possible). To ignore the hardware ecosystem, I made original 17 mm pitch PBT keycaps. It ignores our adaptation too.

Nanaju is a living criticism to the ecosystem. Our adaptation is also a part of the ecosystem. We cannot deny our adaptation because it is just a fact. Power transforms facts into oughtness. Yes, the price tag of a mass-produced product is power. So do you always buy the cheapest product?

I wrote above that “we have no choice.” Now we have Nanaju. If we start to call the ecosystem "the ecosystem", if we gain a different perspective on what rules over us, it is a revolution.