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so I don't know what was funnier about the Cherry factory tour the fact that we
showed up in letter hosen or the fact that they had preemptively arranged for
two of their of the of the women in their marketing department to show up in
um durndle in derle I think it was probably pronouncing that wrong but
durndle absolutely fantastic so they were they were really good sports about
the whole thing I'm sure it was harder to walk around their workplace dressed
like that than it was for us as strangers to people would recognize them
and they're walking around in like heels and D yeah at the office and then and
then they're with these two random dudes who have like very low quality in some
cases ripping all over the place later hosen oh oh man yeah my boxers were
totally showing oh definitely by the end of the day so the first step in the
completely unexpected like I mean everything about these just felt over
engineered but we got to see the acoustic chamber that they use in order
to validate not only the the loudness of
products but also the sound signature of
products which was insane and just to make sure that it's super accurate they
have this this very targeted microphone inside and foot and a halfish uh thick
padding on the outside with this double door system that he had to climb into
well I looked at it and I went well the microphone's next to the switch in this
case it was a it was an mxr GB blue switch and I was like well okay but how
do you actually press the button while having the door closed so not being a
German engineer he assumed that you climb inside and press it manually
yourself every single time turns out that wasn't the answer they actually
have a mechanical finger that presses the switch over and over again for uh
for for validation but hey whatever my
solution would too technically yes so it's not just for validating that as
they make running changes and improvements to cherrymx that the sound
signature stays the same but they do use it for that it's also for certifying
keyboards to be low noise enough to to qualify for um Blue Angel certification
which is like a German government thing where if you want to sell something to
the German government it has to pass the Blue Angel certification so if the
question was who cares if you have a 20 D noise floor acoustic chamber for
keyboards the answer is
someone the next stop in the tour was probably my my favorite part the
environmental Chambers so they have this whole hallway of machines that
essentially torture test keyboards from really torture test they they had a new
product in one of them that was going through a cycle of temperature and
humidity changes just to validate that in storage it wouldn't be broken by any
of aforementioned temperatures and and conditions and so
these things are capable of going anywhere from minus 40 all the way up to
uh plus 180° so why would that ever matter uh
apparently SE Freight is a big deal because if your if your cargo container
is at the top of the ship and it's under the sun for a very long time that that
inner area within the metal is going to get really hot kinds of things you don't
think of and then the uh the chambers can also handle anywhere from 10%
relative humidity all the way up to 98% relative humidity so of course they uh
they they loaded one up at -25° through one of their one of the
testers that they use to validate their 50 million keystroke Cycles which
doesn't just kind of tap it it hammers pretty hard hammers pretty hard and then
they cranked up the humidity in it so we could get this awesome footage of one of
their testers running on uh what switches were they were they MX blacks I
think so I think they were MX blacks of just this thing being hammered at in the
frost in the cold absolutely insane the
craziest machine in my opinion was the temperature shock machine so it goes
from I believe it was 70° the test that they were running it could be more
drastic than this but the test that they were running at the point in time was 70° C in the chamber up top and then
there would be an elevator that took 5 Seconds which would bring it down into a
separate chamber down below which was -20° and it had to be able to not like
crack and not have the solder just yeah fail just completely give up which is
pretty intense actually so in the Next Room we found the most expensive piece
of equipment on this entire trip that I almost broke it has a joystick and he
went a little bit arcade machine on it but it was
okay I was driving that thing so if you've ever seen like a really big
warehouse and you see that crane that's on the big rail at the top that can move
pretty much wherever it wants basically like that it's pretty much what it was
much faster when you when you really go on when you Reef on the joystick yeah so
it's it's just an actuation point but you can program on the computer how you
want it to move so you can check out different batches of switches compared
against each other so they'd go through the Environmental Testing that we' seen
earlier or it would be say something that had just been pressed 50 million
times versus something that hadn't or anything that you want to compare and
you test a batch of switches and the idea is that you'd look at the exact
Force required to press it down and then pull it back up and then you'd also be
looking at where the actuation point was for the switch and the idea is that
you'd want to see as much consistency as possible within a batch and then as much
consistency as possible after 50 million
keystrokes so after 50 million keystrokes it should have either not
gotten that much worse or gotten better
and the funny thing about Cherry is that their whole well our key switches are
validated for 50 million thing is based on this whereas I don't think we really
have any Assurance of what up to let's
say for example 60 million keystrokes means right does that mean it performs
the same or better or it still actually functions at all and Cherry actually has
testing up to 100 million they just wouldn't show us those numbers would not
show us those numbers I'm guessing they're not quite as perfect anymore at that point probably not so the switch we
saw on the last piece had a clear housing so we can tell it's an MX RGB so
that's from the uh Corsair's Corsair gaming RGB line of keyboards but one of
the coolest thing about the RGB keyboards is actually that the way the
LEDs are embedded in the PCB instead of
in the housing for the key switch makes them less prone to failure due to ESD
but of course there are other electrostatic discharge concerns as well
so this was a pretty cool piece of scientific equipment what's this thing
do 8,000 8,000 volts over 8,000 volts so
many volts so he would he would charge up a metal plate that was on the the
table and then make sure very confidently make sure that there was no
electrostatic charge going from the table up through the keyboard so he was
just typing on it and the keyboard has to operate aside from not zapping the
person who's using it operate flawlessly so he's using the keyboard while
charging the table the metal table with 8,000 volts and then he would take the
uh 8,000 volt conductor and put it right on the keyboard and have to be able to
continue using the keyboard with no faults no glove or anything just using
the keyboard well okay they did say that even though it's quite painful it's not
going to you're not going to be serious very low amperage very low current it's
not going to really hurt anybody although I asked actually I don't know if you were there for this I was there
yeah I asked him do you ever like sneak up behind anyone and give them the 8,000
oh yeah oh yeah so Cherry takes keyboards very
seriously but they can still have some fun yeah apparently so we got to see
Cherry's first mechanical keyboard which was made with M8 switches you what mate
a anyways it it was designed so that
when making a newspaper instead of individually placing each one of the
letters onto this giant grid so they could Mass print newspaper you just
typed it up you could type it in reolution Bizarro land keyboard ever
with the weirdest Keys all the go switches go that way go this way go
possibly both ways I and apparently space bar stabilizers space bar
stabilizers didn't really seem to be a thing thing I don't know if those maybe were in there at the beginning and then
were taken out but they were definitely not a thing when I was trying it that
was it was really heavy too yeah super heavy full metal construction around the
whole thing so with the with the original keyboard out of the way we
asked very very nicely if we would be allowed into the Cherry MX production
area and they were very kind about saying no yeah they uh they they wanted
to protect their Trade Secrets you know all the improvements that they've made
to Cherry MX key switches over the over the years that have been not quite
copied correctly by anyone who might be trying to copy the design they didn't
want anyone to look at that so uh yeah yeah anyway so we were able to
make a compromise of being able to check out the actual keyboard manufacturing so
first we got geared up this is my first time wearing an ESD lab coat and
electrostatic sandals yeah so you you take this little
electrostatic strap and put it under your under your shoe and then into your
sock or in L's case under your prer to call them electrostatic sandals but sure
whatever whatever you want to call it and then this was really cool now Cherry
was telling us this production line is actually 20 years old so this is far
from the state-of-the-art that we might find in some of the top secret Areas so
it starts with the crazy robot ARM and I mean I was blown away when he told me
this line is 20 years old yeah and is like nothing to do with the advanced of
some of the other more top secret lines cuz this ARM like picks up the keyboard
top half bottom half puts them on the line and then it all scooches to the
right to the right to the right oh no
anyways these ones it didn't it didn't require individual keycap placement so
we didn't get to see some of the stations running yeah he said it was a lot cooler earlier in the day but these
this is like a special order for the German government so all the key caps
were sort of pre-assembled um so it skipped a lot of the stations but what's
cool is that the stations automatically know if a step doesn't need to be done
Automation and they just don't do it yep so it it went through and the the next
stage actually that we did get to see was it testing all of the switches so
this giant machine that that was pre-aligned for every single one of the
key caps would go down and press every single button just to make sure it
worked and I didn't quite believe it when Cherry told us at first that every
single product was 100% tested cuz I kind of went really that's too much man
but they are and we even saw a keyboard fail yeah yeah we got to see one fail so
the next station which was the laser engraving station that was so cool that
which was super cool that was like the coolest thing ever like two individual lasers going
insanely fast although apparently slow because apparently it's a 10-year-old
laser engraver and is much slower than all their other ones but seemed really
fast to me uh would go through and engrave all the key caps unless it
failed so when we saw that one going through production fail it skipped the
the laser engraving station there was a big red light that went off very serious
business someone ran over and pulled it off the line inspected did it manually
noticed that apparently the machine told them the space bar failed so they found
that it was the stabilizing wire uh
below the space bar which was actually not aligned properly so he aligned it
properly manually put it back at the beginning of the assembly process and it
went through all the testing again when it passed then it got laser engraved and
then it went to packaging very cool I mean I think the thing that stood out
most to me about the entire Cherry tour
was the obsessive attention to detail
and quality testing validation secondary
validation for something that I just completely took for granted until I saw
what goes into the amount of science the amount of everything that goes into
these little tiny switches so uh I guess I guess that's pretty much it I huge
thanks to Cherry for letting us really take a look under the kimono so to speak
of their manufacturing process uh thanks to you guys for watching like this video
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