Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Your Keyboard Sucks and I Can Prove It. – Labs Keyboard Testing”.
I want you to stop typing on garbage, and I’ve got just the thing to make. It happen with some help from our Labs team and my new robot friend here. I intend to make sure that you never get fooled by flashy marketing. Again, it presses it stresses it: undresses, hey yeah, not all the cameras on you, yep cave here is programmed to do all sorts of useful things, but, most importantly, he’s designed to give you some of the most accurate and precise keyboard data on the market.
So no manufacturer can get away with BS in their product. Specs ever again be afraid. Keyboard makers be very afraid, afraid of this segue to our sponsor zoho1 Zoho one brings together sales marketing Finance, analytics and support in a single unified platform to run your entire business.
Try Zoho won today for 30 days, using the link down below when your Corsair, k70 Pro or Logitech g915 rolls off the production line. It goes through a series of QC or quality control checks to make sure that every little piece of it is within the manufacturer’s specified tolerances. Do the switches work? Do they chatter? Does the RGB light? Does the chassis line up? Is the cable freighter, the logos upside down or off center? All of these things and more are checked before your keyboard goes into the box out the door and finally lands on your desk, but a quality controlled product is not necessarily a quality product Brands. Love to use words like precise, but then stay conveniently quiet. When you ask for details how precise what is your specified error, tolerance, I mean think about it. If the force to push down W and S let’s say, was allowed to be plus or minus ten percent, the difference could be as much as 20 between them. Is that going to cost you a critical hit? What if you were to push the space bar here? Instead of here, will it feel the same? Will it work at all with the flex of ryzen 4S? We intend to find out, it’s got. Seven degrees of freedom can move payloads as heavy as three and a half kilograms and can reach over 780 millimeters we’ve spent months, getting this guy up and running to a degree that we deem satisfactory to start sharing the data with you. Okay, second Jake show me what you got. Is Cherry mx’s plus minus 10, accurate what what actually works so far? Well, we haven’t actually started Cherry MX, but on this particular keyword, what we’ve done is we’ve taken. It we’ve placed it into the build area and tightened these little screws up against it, so that it doesn’t move. It is moving. That’S well only if you push it the robot’s not going to move it. What we’re doing is we’re taking the computer vision, okay and we’re actually taking a series of different frames, we’re composing those over top of each other after we do Edge detection, so we can actually see where each of the keys are.
So we can tell the size of the key the shape of the key. So once that’s done, the robot will move down onto the center point of each key press down measure the force as it travels and then measure it as it releases as well doing. This gives us not only the force graph for the switches being used on the board, but also it lets us know if any of the switches are out of spec, but how accurate slash precises it. What is this exactly? It looks a little suggestive.
This is Antoine’s handiwork. It wasn’t my first choice. Okay, what this is. This is a 3D printed finger and effectively it’s a finger yeah, it’s a finger for sure, PG show this is actually connected to the force load cell built into the robot. So when we press down we’re actually able to record the Precision at 0.001 Newton, so really really fine detail. This is way better than what we had during our like last tour, where we had like a prototype thing of this oh way way better yeah, we replaced the previous system because, because the Gantry system that we had actually has issues with moving and vibration, this is Really stable with a high amount of repeatability, which means that we’re not going to run into those issues and dirty our data.
We want things to be cleanliness. Is it supposed to be doing things like? Were we going to start it at some point yeah as soon as as soon as we have a cue Antoine can hit e and it’ll start moving yeah yeah yeah yeah. It will move fast, whoa, hey whoa, how you doing okay! Well, yeah! Do the thing I mean, did you stop it? No, he didn’t, but we moved the keyboard. That’S all is this one of those things where you like get the demo ready for the CEO and then the CEO leaves and it didn’t.
Actually it wasn’t actually working. Of course, this is all pre-programmed and then you move the keyboard. It took an image of the area and detected where the keys were yeah, and then we moved to the keyboard yeah I see so obviously it hasn’t can’t see it. Okay, it’s too close to a new image yeah. We can do it. I guess if I’m like bumping this in the middle of the thing that ruins everything – oh yeah, we’re not going to use this data for any publishing. This is just to show you, and to show line is what you’re seeing here is an HSV version of the camera image, and this is for calibration purposes. So if the camera gets bumped or moves, what we’re going to do is we’re going to find these four points here and we’re going to do a d skew on the image to make sure that we’re looking at a level field.
So once we’ve done that it’s going to take the 50 frames of video, run the edge detection on each of them and then composite those together and that way, if there’s any autofocus issues we’re able to bypass that, how long does that take it’s done right now? It’S not 100 perfect, but we have a new computer vision higher, who it’s her specialty to make things like this work, we’re working on it and actually we’re looking at moving away from computer vision to a 3D laser profiler, and then we hired a person to do This and then immediately they’re out of a job, no, no, no good, she’s, actually she’s, a machine learning and computer vision. Specialist. The same skill set applies to the 3D image that we’re going to get okay from the profiler okay.
But it’s laser thing: it’s a laser with lasers, okay, yeah, no sharks, but lasers. Okay, I’m just gon na ask whatever it’s attached to. Can we name it shark? What the 3D laser profile is going to do is really clean up the image we don’t have to worry about lighting.
We don’t have to worry about changes in the environment and because it’s just looking at the height map, all of the gaps between each of the keys, presents a huge, distinct drop right, meaning that we’re going to get every key every time. Whereas right now we get them Shadows, we’ve got. I guess. Ah that’s the point of this.
This is the light blocker 9000 and they did not want to have this on here for the shoot because it looks janky. But what we had to do was put this on here to get even this good of an image, because once you change your lighting and have you know a shadow like this, it’s really easy to get an extra key detected on that line. What we do have is the ability for the person running the test to actually remove and add boxes if they need to after a full test run of 100. Some odd switches cave is going to tell us with certainty how many of them actuate or send a signal to your PC, whether they actuate early or late, compared to the spec.
Whether the travel distance being reported by the manufacturer is accurate. If the bump in a tactile switch is where they say it is, and these might sound like very boring little details to you but they’re. The kind of thing that you don’t realize is a problem until you are thighs deep in a gaming or writing session, and you keep accidentally freaking crumpling. That line any error from our point of view, should be the fault of the user and not of the peripheral and small deviations like this can make a huge difference when muscle memory is at play.
Do you guys remember this viral video showing people tripping on 36th Street subway station in New York that stare was less than an inch out of spec, that’s less than 15 percent? Of course, this only helps us if we can test every keyboard. Can we do that? Oh buddy, let me tell you right now we’re able to test this keyboard in 30 minutes and I know a few places we can actually find Time Savings. I think we can get it down to 25.. I can see one place.
We could probably save some time like if we have that laser depth map, we probably wouldn’t need to start like exactly the key and then go down slowly, and I guess the slowness is so that we get nice clean readings exactly it so right now we’re actually Going to a fixed height that is higher than any known keyboard, we’ve found right. Okay, and that way we know we’re never going to crash into it, because that would be bad. It would be very bad, like it’s an expensive robot you’d go right through the keyboard and probably damage the robot. Tell me something, though: no user would ever press a key like that.
So so after we hit everything, slowly have we considered going back and doing a fast hit and, looking at what that looks like we have, we’ve also actually considered hitting the corners as well for checking for key binding. I’Ve just been told that our new procurement hire has 150 keyboards on order already, with our goal being to test 200 by the end of this year, starting with the big names like Logitech, Corsair and Razer, then moving on to the other top selling keyboards on Amazon. But that only tells us about the field. What about latency or other concerns like repairability? What this history does is measuring the total system latency.
So from the time you click on the keyboard to the time you have a response up on the display, like Amazon, flash to automate this process, we’ve got a solenoid right here that presses the key for us, then, once the key is pressed, the signal goes to Two places it goes to this Nvidia ldat detector box, and it goes to the accompanying software on the PC by measuring the difference in time between the signal reaching here and the muzzle flash appearing here, we can find out how long it takes between pressing a key On your keyboard and your character moving on screen, this kind of real world testing is really important because it allows us to quantify the importance of say. High polling rates in keyboards it’ll also help us discover if there’s more to latency than just the pulling rate. It’S pretty rudimentary for now, and what we want to do in the longer term is set up a USB breakout circuit, that’s tied to a logic.
Analyzer then watch the USB packet as it crosses the wire, but that’s going to take a little bit of time. For those of you wondering, by the way for Bluetooth, we’ll just be using a dongle one question I have about this is right now we’re using a 360 Hertz monitor, which is the fastest available for now, but as faster monitors become available. Will that make our old data no longer applicable? If we switch and use say a 500 Hertz monitor, dear data will still be relevant because my goal is to have the end-to-end latency and still subtracting the system. So just the PC and the display from the keyboard latency, so you would have just a keyboard latency, okay, so this part would still make sense in the long run right. How are we going to remove the display latency from the keyboard? Latency Nvidia in the ldat system, give us the the PC latency.
So we just take that value subtract it. Oh, this is being said, I’m not a big fan of that method. That’S why we are working on on the USB breaker and Music Analyzer. Just yeah draw the keyboard. The idea is to have boss value or real world value sure and the theoretical value, and the reason that that matters is because you might see a theoretical value. That’S half the time of another keyboard, but in terms of the difference that it’s going to make to an actual game might be functionally zero, because that makes up such a small portion of the total latency that it’s just languageable.
For example, you can have a keyboard that is one millisecond, as a latency of one milliseconds or two milliseconds seems like a lot like two times more. But when you take the full end-to-end latency, it might be the difference between 15 and 60 milliseconds. How the hell are you going to test 200 keyboards by the end of this? That’S a great question. That’S a wonderful question because it’s going to be you right so far, just me, of course, there’s a lot more to evaluating a keyboard than just collecting data about the key switches and the latency.
One of the other big concerns in the lab is repairability, for instance, how easy is it to access the screws? Do you have to pull off little rubber feet that you then can’t read here once we have our website up and running more on that later, we aim to list all the screw types and tools required whether or not there are plastic Clips holding pieces together. Any extra steps you might need to get it apart and tear down pictures, so you can see for yourself what’s inside the board. You’Re buying we’ll also be giving points for whether or not boards have hot swappable pcbs for switch Replacements and detachable cables, because not having to solder in order to repair. Your keyboard makes it much easier for regular users to keep their Electronics out of the landfill. We also want to use our articles to contextualize this information. I mean it’s all fine and good to see a key switch actuation Force graph, but how does it feel our aim is to include comparisons, then against popular switches and keyboards to help set you in the right direction? Do you like the feel of MX Blues, but want something quieter? Do you like the actuation force of your Amazon Basics keyboard, but wish it felt less mushy and looked nicer? We’Ve still got a long way to go. We already talked about moving to a high-speed 3D laser profiler system instead of a camera, so that we can get 3D images of each board and the website isn’t anywhere close to being ready. While we do have several test plans drafted, there are still a lot of questions to answer around ergonomics and dimensions and key rollover and ghosting connectivity bundle and packaging software, firmware, backlighting extra controls and, of course, sound. These are all things we haven’t even touched on today, but we do have plans in the works for them so stay tuned.
The ultimate goal is to create an information repository with a detailed breakdown of test results. Pictures from every angle, maybe a rubric scoring system I’ll, be arguing hard against it, but it might be unavoidable and, most importantly, to all the enthusiasts out there, a sound Library where you can listen to each keyboard in its stock configuration one of the biggest problems with Keyboard audio tests online is a lack of consistency which we hope to solve by using the same space and desk materials, namely deskpad from lttstore.com, as well as the same microphone, so that you get the closest sound possible to hearing it in person. Lofty goals.
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