[Coco] Mechanical keyboard upgrades for the CoCo

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Aug 26, 2015, at 04:12, Louis Ciotti <lciotti at lrlc.us> wrote:
> 
> Mark the prices you got were they for a complete custom set of keys, or were they for standard keys with just the different one custom?   I can see a huge price difference depending on what was quoted.

The $90 per keyboard at quantity 20 was for full custom. That company only makes sense for much larger quantities, as I believe that price was heavily loaded with NRE. I could get quantities up to where the price made sense if the CoCo was still in mass production, probably, but the target market is just too small now by a couple orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, WASD keyboards caters to single-quantity customers, and they look like they have reasonable single-piece prices on full custom keyboard sets. There are enough keys that need custom markings that multiplying the single-keycap price by the number of special keys gets very expensive, and the full custom keycap set is cheaper. Don't forget things like shift and enter keys, which are too wide for the CoCo's limited space using PC-sized keys.

This shows the sizes available in each row from WASD keyboards:

http://support.wasdkeyboards.com/customer/portal/articles/1366948-keycap-compatibility

In the layouts I suggested last night, I repurposed 1x1.25 row one modifier keys in place of the usual 1x2.25 and 1x2.75 shift keys, and the 1x1.75 caps lock key in place of the usual 1x2.25 enter key.

I haven't gotten a quote from WASD on a 57-key custom CoCo set yet, but I'm hoping it's on par with their custom PC arrangements.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/