There is a keyboard that is the best in the world

A Journey to Designing the Seneca, a Prototypes of the Torus-based Assembled Topre Boards

The problems that Norbauer has to tackle are more interesting than he’s aware of. He’s having the firmware rewritten to make it open-source and add hardware remapping. There is a next keyboard that needs to be designed. New materials to experiment with. And there’s that other stabilizer design, the less complicated one — a few companies have approached him about getting it into production, but it needs a bit more R&D first.

You can read about Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca in the other article we just published. The short version is this: the Seneca keyboard is a descendant of the aftermarket housings Norbauer used to make for Topre boards. The keyboard is made of components you cannot find anywhere else, and assembled by a small team of keyboard nerds in Los Angeles.

Towards a Business of High-Standard Computer Graphics: How a Hardware Engineer Can Make a Keycap for Star Trek Fans

My vision for what we’re doing is similar to that of a camera company. They do crazy things that just wouldn’t exist otherwise, like their monochrome camera. I think it’s a very technically interesting thing. It has a small audience for it. You have to charge a huge amount for it in order to make it reasonable, because how many people are going to buy it? But I’m happier that that exists in the world.”

Even as he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from a company that sells housings to one that sells keyboards, he kept running into the fact that he does not like most aspects of running a business. This is not a huge problem when you’re selling a few dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre enthusiasts as a self-funding hobby. If you’re trying to build a business that sells fully custom luxury keyboards, it might become a problem.

He used a modified Topre Realforce 87u keyboard in an aftermarket aluminum housing. He was also designing a set for Star Trek fans. Like most aftermarket keycaps, it worked with Cherry MX-style mechanical switches; Topre boards have a different keycap mount. So he couldn’t use his Star Trek keycaps on his favorite keyboard.

He wanted an electrical engineering firm to design the PCB but figured that it would be the hardest part sinceTopre switch clones are easy to come by. That took about a year, on and off. “And then I realized, ‘Shit, I guess I have to make all the other stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about five years.”

The project turned into a deliberate process of making the best keyboard he possibly can, regardless of cost. “It was one of those things where my ambitions just kind of spiraled out of control.”

He figured he could do better. His first prototypes sounded great, but they were just as wobbly as Topre. The second design had tighter tolerances and it sounded worse than the first. He added more material to get a deeper sound. Each revision required a further round of injection-molded tooling as he tried to find the best combination of feel and sound.

Topre switches — most famously found in the Happy Hacking Keyboard — have a rubber dome under each key, instead of a physical switch. Pushing the key collapses the dome, which compresses a conical spring; a capacitive circuit under each key senses the change in capacitance and, at a certain threshold, registers a keypress. Releasing the switch snaps the dome back into place.

Introducing a new compliant beam stabilizer for the Seneca keyboard: The Norbauer-seneca-creator

The original plan was to use hand-lubed stabilizers, right? I wanted to see if there was a way to solve this problem without having to rely on lubrication.

Developing the Seneca’s stabilizers took several years, a bunch of false starts, and, in his words, a “personal cash bazooka.” His first attempt, mostly on his own, resulted in what he considered a “90 percent solution” — better than anything on the market, without lube. There is 90 percent of the place that isn’t there. He began to walk away.

He worked with a firm to develop a stabilizer mechanism that was completely new. They came up with two new stabilizer mechanisms. The first is a compliant-beam design that’s significantly better than existing stabilizers as well as his first prototype. It’s much less prone to rattle or tick. It is close to perfect, but not completely rethinking how stabilizers work. The pin-joint hinges in the second design have five times as many parts as a standard stabilizer. It’s hideously expensive to produce and both time consuming and fiddly to assemble, but it’s better.

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

The Los Angeles Seneca: An Extremely Well-Posed Computer Keyboard to People’s Needs Without A Riddle

This is illustrative of Norbauer’s general approach, which is that solving technical problems is much more interesting than trying to minimize production costs. That has taken to an extreme on the Seneca. Our goal is just to make this good, and that is all we care about. And so whenever there was a branch, I was like, ‘Let’s go with the rightest way to do it and damn the costs.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”

His case is made out of aluminum with a matt finish and he had to set up a company in China to get it. There’s a warm gray option called travertine, which has a matte, slightly speckled stonelike look, and a lighter gray called oxide, which looks a bit like concrete. They are both easy to touch. I haven’t seen a black version in person but there is a titanium option.

The switchplate is made from brass and then chrome-padded for a modern look. Brass absorbs sound better than aluminum, so it’s cheaper and easier to mill. The PCB contains a galvanic isolation chip to mitigate the incredibly unlikely event that a rogue power supply sends a blast of electricity from the computer’s USB port into the keyboard. The cable has an obscenely expensive Lemo connector on the keyboard side. Lemo ties are more secure than theusb and Norbauer thinks that they are better because he has a keyboard.

The Seneca represents Norbauer’s attempt to make the best possible computer keyboard, to his own standards and tastes, without worrying about cost — the kind of keyboard that looks and feels like we remember keyboards feeling, back when we thought computers were a good idea.

Norbauer or Taeha Kim make each Seneca in Los Angeles, at a rate of one or two per day.

The stabilizers only take a few hours to make, including the step where he uses a small reamer to make pin holes large enough for the pins to fit in.

It took years to develop the stabilizers. They are hideously complex and are difficult to put together, but they are the best stabilizers in the world. There’s no rattle or tick in any of the stabilized keys, and although the spacebar has a deeper thunk than the rest of the keys, it’s not much louder to my ears.

A keyboard that has both high upfront costs and high per-unit costs is the cumulative effect of all those choices. I ask Norbauer if he is making any money on the Seneca, even at 3,600 a pop, because it sounds so expensive.

Norbauer: How did you start the Seneca? “How did you sell that first batch?,” says Mr Bernabe, CEO of the resavernment

“I mean, definitely when I sell this first batch, and probably the second batch, and well into the third or fourth, I would not have recouped my R&D costs on it. It is an interesting question. I am bad at business.

For most of the time he was making aftermarket housings, he says, the business wasn’t particularly profitable. I have always wanted to break even while also doing cool R&D. I don’t feel that I am losing a lot of money. But the Heavy Grail, for example, was a very popular offering. I thought it would sell less, but it sold far better than I thought. The bootstrap and funding of the Seneca would have been better if the profit had gone into that.

He sold half the company to an investment firm run by an old friend when he was staring at a mountain of logistical tasks. The arrangement leaves Norbauer with total creative control, and the ability to focus on developing keyboards, as well as allowing others to take care of the money part of it.

The executive in residence is the one that is identified asCaleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co. Norbauer writes in the post that the COO is basically doing all the things he shouldn’t and that he’s impressively good at them.

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

Norba Force: From a Single Startup to a Tendonitis-Induced Obsessed Topre Keyboard

He wanted more control over the rest of the board, and he wanted something to cater to people who like the Norbauer aesthetic, but aren’t up for buying a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the warranty, and transplant the guts into a new case.

Each was a chance to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing capability, and to experiment with different materials (steel, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (polishing, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

The Norbaforce was for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, while the Heavy/6 and Heavy-9 were for Leopold FC660C and FC980C. And in 2020, there was the Heavy Grail, his most popular housing, for the Happy Hacking Keyboard.

Topre keyboards are rare compared to mechanical keyboards using Cherry MX-style switches. Only a few companies ever made them, and they are more expensive, with less features, because there are not many layout options. They’re also harder to customize, with only a few different dome options; they also aren’t compatible with most aftermarket keycaps out of the box. And while metal cases are common in enthusiast mechanical keyboards, Topre keyboards only come in plastic. But Topre boards have a dedicated fan base because the domes give Topre switches a snappy tactility you can’t otherwise replicate.

Two more companies were started by the dating website. Selling all three startups in 2010 gave him the time and money to explore new interests: at first, learning some industrial design skills so he could make Star Trek prop replicas. It also led him to Topre keyboards.

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this got him a website, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis involved adopting proper typing form (wrists straight, hands hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Searching for a more comfortable keyboard eventually sent him down the path of an obsession.

Norbauer is a person who likes to find out how to build things from scratch. About 20 years ago, he got an idea for a dating website. “I didn’t have any money at all. I dropped out of a PhD program to start the company I was going to start. and I couldn’t hire anyone to code it for me. I suppose I just have to learn how to code.

Norbauer grew up in West Virginia in the 1990s, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and absorbing both its retro-modern aesthetic and its vision of an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was the beginning of the internet and personal computing. The window into the future of Star Trek, of Epcot, was created when the computer represented an escape from the world as it is, a view that a more connected world would be a better one.

How much is it worth to create your own keyboard? Ask friends and family to type on the Seneca, not a keyboard nerd

I have asked my friends and family members to attempt to type on the Seneca over the past month. Most of them have desk jobs, and most use mechanical keyboards all day long, but they’re not keyboard nerds.

The term “endgame,” among keyboard enthusiasts, is sort of a running gag. Endgame is when you finally dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keycaps, so you can stop noodling around with parts and get on with whatever it is you actually use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a few months later you see something shiny and start over.

But what if you didn’t have to compromise? The time, patience, and cash is what you would have to have to create your own keyboard. And I mean really from scratch, from the cable to the switches and stabilizers.

If you’re selling a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your audience to two tiny and overlapping groups. You need to be able to convince the keyboard nerds that your keyboard is something they cannot get anywhere else. You have to convince the keyboard nerds that this keyboard is worth half of the price of an entry-level luxury car.

They have been somewhat impressed. Everyone thinks it looks nice, and everyone likes the way it feels and sounds, but they are not blown away. It hasn’t ruined them for their Keychrons. Most of them ask where the number pad is.

Towards a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed: A Norbauer Seneca review: the first production-run of the unit

The Seneca has a totally flat typing angle. Most mechanical keyboards are higher in the back than the front, with a typing angle between 3 and 11 degrees. In general, flat is better. If you choose, you can get an optional riser that allows you to have a three-degree typing angle. I made the keyboard negative three degrees angle and all my other keyboards felt weird. This might be the Seneca’s biggest impact on my life going forward.

There are other quirks. The Seneca’s custom cable uses USB-C on the computer end and a Lemo connector at the near end. It looks cool, and it keeps the aesthetic coherent, but if the desk has a rotation of keyboards, you have to replace the cables every time. Are you really going to take a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard off your desk if you buy it? You probably have a lot of nice keyboards you want to use, if you care enough about keyboards to buy this one. (Norbauer is working on a short Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, but that also wasn’t ready during the review period.)

The Edition Zero Senecas, including my review unit, came with closed-source firmware that doesn’t allow for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the biggest omission. When Norbauer commissioned the firmware half a decade ago, he opted not to include remappability for the sake of simplicity. He believed that remapping software would suffice for a keyboard with a standard layout.

The unit I’ve been testing is from Edition Zero — the first production run — which includes 50 that were offered in a private sale last summer to a small group of previous Norbauer clients, as well as a few more for testing, certification, and review.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

The Nordbauer Seneca: a $3,600 luxury capactive keyboard for the keyboard obsessed (Norbauer’s review)

It’s heavy, expensive, and pleasant to type on, but only some keyboard enthusiasts will fully appreciate it.

For lack of a better word, the Seneca feels permanent. It is seven pounds and looks like a concrete or worn-down stone. The case is milled aluminum, with a plasma-ceramic oxidized finish that has a warm gray textured look but feels totally smooth. There’s nothing to hold it up; you have to pick it up. It is supposed to stay at your desk.

The experience of typing is great. The keys have a big tactile bump right at the top, a smooth downstroke, and a snappy upstroke. My review unit has medium weight ones which are supposed to feel like 45g topre, with lighter and heavier options.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

The Seneca Thock Sound: Like Raindrops or Raindrop-like Soft Shocks? A Preliminary Test with Verge

There are gaskets between the switches and the solid brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping material everywhere. The result was a quiet thock without any hint of ping.

The keyboard’s info page says, “The gentle sound of the Seneca is often likened to raindrops. It has a soft intentionally vintage-sounding thock without being obtrusively clacky.” Read that in whatever voice you’d like. For what it’s worth, Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, who did not read the info page but did listen to the typing test embedded below, also said it sounded like raindrops.