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
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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 to 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 liners 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 that 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 changing 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
locally 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
the idea is to have both 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 negligible for example you can have a
keyboard that is one millisecond
um as the late 107 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 indeed and as you can see
we're not there yet but you know who is there our sponsor our sponsor is always
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this video maybe check out our 80 person Studio Tour there are a lot of people
working here now actually there's like four more since then
kind of out of control