- 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.
(soulful jazz music)
Hey, yeah, not while the camera is on, you!
Yep, KAVE here's 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 BSing their product specs ever again.
Be afraid, keyboard makers.
Be very afraid.
Afraid of this segue to our sponsor, Zoho One.
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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 frayed?
Are 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 10%,
the difference could be as much as 20% between them.
Is that gonna 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 Flexiv Rizon 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 keyboard 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 gonna move it.
What we're doing is we're taking the computer vision,
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.
- Exactly, yep. - Okay.
- So once that's done, the robot will move down
under 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 outta spec.
- But how accurate/precise is 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, so 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, we're talking-
- 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 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 gonna run
into those issues and dirty our data.
We want things to be clean, Linus.
- Is it supposed to be doing things?
Like were we gonna 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.
- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, do it.
- It will move fast.
- Whoa, hey! (robot whooshes)
Whoa. How you doing?
Okay, well, yeah, did do the thing.
I mean, is it, did you stop it?
- No, he didn't, but we moved 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 yet?
- Of course, this is all pre-programmed
and then you moved the keyboard.
It took an image of the area
and detected where the keys were,
and then we moved the keyboard.
- Yeah, I see.
- So obviously it hasn't, it can't see it.
It's too close.
- Can we do a new image?
- Yeah, we can do a new image.
- Oh, I guess if I'm, like, bumping this
in the middle of the thing, that ruins everything.
- Well, yeah.
We're not gonna use this data for any publishing.
This is just to show you and to show Linus.
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 gonna do is we're gonna find
these four points here and we're gonna do a deskew
on the image to make sure
that we're looking at a level field.
So once we've done that, it's gonna 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 auto focus issues,
we're able to bypass that.
- How long does that take?
- It's done.
Right now, it's not a hundred percent perfect,
but we have a new computer vision hire
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-
- When 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 skillset applies to the 3D image
that we're gonna get from the profiler.
- Okay. And it's like a laser thing?
- It's laser, - With lasers.
- With lasers, no sharks, but lasers.
- Okay, I was just gonna ask whatever it's attached to.
Can we name it S.H.A.R.K.?
- What the 3D laser profile is gonna do
is really clean up the image.
We don't have to worry about lighting.
We don't have to worry about changes in 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.
Meaning that we're gonna get every key, every time.
- Whereas right now we got shadows.
We've got, I guess, ah, that's the point of this.
This is the Light Blocker 9000
and they did not wanna 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 as they need to.
- After a full test run of a hundred-some odd switches.
KAVE is gonna 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 crimping 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 stair was less than an inch out of spec.
That's less than 15%.
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 a full inch over the key.
- [Jake] Exactly. - And then go down slowly.
And I guess the slowness is so
that we get nice clean readings off.
- That's 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 gonna 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 after we hit everything slowly,
have we considered going back
and doing a fast hit and looking at what that looks likes?
- 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 feel.
What about latency, or other concerns like repairability?
- What this test rig does
is measuring the total system latency.
So from the time you click on the keyboard
to the time you have a response on the display
- Like a muzzle 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 polling rate.
It's pretty rudimentary for now.
And what we wanna 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 gonna 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
- The old 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've just the keyboard latency.
So this part would still make sense in the long run
- How are we going to remove the display latency
from the keyboard latency?
- Luckily, NVIDIA in the LDAT system,
gives us the the PC latency.
So we just take that value, subtract it.
This being said, I'm not a big fan of that method.
That's why we are working on the USB breaker
and logic analyzer to have just the keyboard.
- So we can see the packet in flight.
- Just, yeah, just keyboard.
The idea is to have both value.
The real world value, 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,
it 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, has a latency
of one 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 16 milliseconds.
- How the hell are you gonna test 200 keyboards
by the end of this year?
- That's a great question. (both men laugh)
That's a wonderful question.
- 'Cause it's gonna 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 pulloff little rubber feet
that you then can't readhere?
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 wanna 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, back lighting, extra controls,
and, of course, sound. (keyboard clicks)
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 desk pad 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?
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If you guys enjoyed 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.
It's kind of outta control.