Hi all,

I thought I'd share with you my new toy - a custom made Amiga-styled keyboard!

I am currently putting together parts for my X5000, when the motherboard (finally) is available to purchase from AmigaKit. I need a keyboard, and while I could just buy any cheap USB keyboard, I was thinking about one with a more Amiga feel. AmigaKit sell an Amiga keyboard, although they have run out of stock and only have the grey model left. TheDaddy ran a kickstart campaign for a custom mechanical keyboard, although it has since finished.

So I decided to place an order at wasdkeyboards.com for a fully customised Amiga keyboard that I could design myself.

WASD offer a number of products. They can produce fully customised keycaps for your own Cherry MX mechanical keyboard, or single caps. They have have a non-customisable backlit mechanical keyboard.

I opted for the keyboard (as I don't have one) + custom keycaps.

The website's basic designer allows you to choose the layout you want (104-key, 105-key, tenkeyless, Mac, etc), select colours for each individual key, and provides basic options for the OS keys. It was pleasing to see that they offer the Classic Amiga keys as an out-of-the-box option (they also provide a Commodore key as a one-off).

If you want to fully customise your keyboard, you'll need to download a template in svg format from their website and load it into a DTP program. I'm not sure if the current version of PageStream supports svg.

From there, you can really go to town. Take a full-colour image and apply to any (or all!) keys. Add whatever text you want to whatever key. Although the templates provde the basic QWERTY (and other) layouts, you're free to do whatever you like. The demo pictures provide plenty of weird and wonderful inspiration, including keyboards that look amazing but must be impossible to use if you're not a touch-typist!

As you can see below, I took a fairly conservative approach to my keyboard. It's a basic QWERTY. For the OS keys, I've got a Boing Ball. Obviously, the Help key is labelled. I also use AllKeys to map a few keys, so these are now labelled:
Menu key brings up Exchange
Ctrl-keypad 5 brings up the calculator
Ctrl-Home brings up "Screen Switching Done Right".
The Alt keys I labelled LAlt and RAlt cos, yknow, sometimes it's hard to remember which is left and which is right. :)
And the final touch - an AmigaOS logo on the spacebar.

Modifiers are white, while the keys are black. The "sub" functions I've coloured in brown.

It's pretty fun, and I worked on the layout over a couple of nights. As I said, you're free to apply any graphic you want, in colour. However, you have to re-map bitmaps to vector graphics. Using structured images makes the final product look great, as they can be scaled without losing detail or getting pixellated.

It's worth nothing that you can only customise the tops of the keys, you can't print anything on the body of the keyboard, or on the front of them. However, you can put an oversized image across multiple keys, which cteates an interesting effect.

The major downside is cost. These keyboards aren't cheap. The keyboard itself, including customisation, was $US150. Plus, I requested Cherry Black switches (if you know much about Cherry MX keyboards...), which was an extra $US10. And shipping internationally was a whopping $US50!

But it did arrive pretty quick, 1 week from submitting my order to receiving the final product.

The packaging is very professional:


Off course, I opened it pretty quick!


Inside, apart from the keyboard, are a few accessories:


The keyboard isn't hard-wired, but takes a micro-USB cable. A nice touch is that there are three cable runs built into the base, so you can have the cable come directly out the back, or to either side. There's a nice built-in cable tie, with WASD branding.



The base has solid rubber feet, and two fold-out feet to give you some more elevation.


Cherry MX keycaps are (in theory) interchangeable, so they include a tool to yank them off, again with the WASD branding. Thoughtfully, they include a USB-->PS2 converter, probably because PC gamers tend to be very keen about PS2.

And although they make a selling-point of not including any branding on the keyboard, WASD do include a sticker in hopes that you'll apply it. Fat chance! I'm ordering a black Boing-Ball badge from AmigaKit for that.



Here's the left-hand side, showing the Boing-Ball left OS key, and LAlt:



And the right hand side, sowing the RAlt, Boing Ball again, and the Menu key / Exchange:


Another view of the upper right hand side. The number pad 5 has the calculator icon (WASD's template provides a number of stock icons to use, but I didn't like their calculator so I found a different one online). The Help key is at the top, plus Home has "Scrns" - pressing Ctrl-Home bring up SSDR's very slick looking screen with all the open screens on it.



Not sure about the brown-on-black text. I got the idea from one of the demo keyboards, but now that I see it, I'm not so sure. It's OK, but I think a colour with stronger contrast would be better.

A longer take of the right hand side. You can just see the AmigaOS logo on the spacebar.


And a close-up:


Pretty pleased with the AmigaOS logo. Again, some high-contrast might be better (I'm thinking a white spacebar), but the value of using vector graphics really pays off.

The keys are UV printed. WASD formerly offered laser engraving or etching, but now only offers UV printing. Some users have complained they wear off pretty quick - we shall just have to wait and see.

If you look closely, you might notice I made a boo-boo. It took me a day or so, but I kicked myself when I noticed it. The Boing Balls aren't actually red and white, it's a slightly grey colour. D'Oh! The graphic I downloaded was like that, and I didn't change it. However, after telling WASD, they've offered to fix the colours, re-print the two keys and send them out - free of charge. Great customer service!

My old keyboard had a power key, which I remapped with AllKeys to reset OS4. The new keyboard doesn't have one, so I may order a custom printed key and remap to that, probably replacing Break. I might get a couple of the Classic Amiga OS keys as well, and perhaps the white spacebar.

Anyway, here's my new keyboard connected to my A1XE, along with the new mouse I got (it's nothing special, just a cheap Zalman USB mouse). Just waiting on the X5000 now...

Last edited by daveyw on 01-Feb-2017 at 07:23 PM.

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AmigaOne X5000 P5020 2Ghz, OS 4.1
AmigaOne XE G4 800mhz, OS 4.1
A1200T 40Mhz 68040, OS 3.9