Fully wireless, metal, split, ergo -- sounds great right?
The Unigo66 is all of those and it’s also fully broken.
The designer had a dream of creating a premium ergonomic board using Logitech’s proven
wireless technology.
But wake up to find that transplanting harvested chips and not even including a backup wired
option is just a gross display of arrogance.
The packaging and accessories is one area the Unigo66 excels at.
The custom box is really nice, and the keyboards come affixed to a display stand.
The stand isn’t something where you put the boards away after each use because you
need a screw driver for it, but that doesn’t matter.
It being a secure connection is actually a plus, because on display is the only place
this board will ever be.
The design of the Unigo66 is pretty cool.
The high profile case has a purposeful side seam with a stylistic corner element.
An angle is provided by these feet that are probably one of the coolest I’ve seen on
a board.
The bottom has a large frosted polycarbonate window to let the wireless signal through.
Ergonomic keyboards very obviously put function over form, so it’s cool to see something
that tries to make the best around this layout.
The case is three pieces per side.
The top, bottom, and the window.
The top integrates a plate, so some amount of assembly complexity is avoided.
Being a hotswap keyboard, there are mounting holes to affix the PCB to the plate.
In other keyboards, I leave these out, but due to the size and the integrated plate,
I assumed it couldn’t get much harsher, so I put them on.
This PCB is where all the magic doesn’t happen.
This isn’t like other keyboard PCBs because it’s wireless.
But wait, you might say, I’ve seen wireless keyboards before.
What’s so special about this?
Well, when I say this is wireless, I mean wireless.
You know how most existing wireless keyboards have an option to use it wired?
This doesn’t.
Even if you wanted to use a cable, you can't.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the wireless performance wasn’t utter garbage, but more
on that later.
Each half is powered by a coin cell battery.
A little unusual to use non-rechargeables, but if it could reach the claimed 6 months
of life, it would be an elegant solution.
So let’s talk about those problems.
When I first got it, it was in a somewhat usable state.
The dongle of dongles could pick up the signal and I was able to flash a new layout.
I quickly ran into integrity issues though.
When I plugged it into the rear IO of my computer, the halves would often hang and get the order
of their keystrokes all mixed up.
Even when working alright, there would be up to a one second delay between pressing
the key, and a code being registered.
This was more or less resolved when I got the megadongle closer to the keyboards, maybe
less than a foot.
This did raise questions of the actual advantage of it being wireless if I needed to have a
dongle in my line of sight at all times.
Next issue was when I brought it to work.
For whatever reason, I didn’t test that all keys work, and only discovered that two
positions are dead after trying to type a forward slash.
I ran a couple continuity checks and it doesn’t seem like the issue is with the switch or
the sockets.
I think I need to try reflowing the chip but I don't really know how to do that
In the process of diagnosing this, I flashed the default layout and cleared the EEPROM,
and it might’ve been coincidence, but the boards were all but bricked afterward.
The right side was entirely unresponsive, and the left side would output a jumbled mess
of keycodes that resembled a shorting PCB.
I checked the voltages on the batteries to discover that the right side was completely
dead at 1.2V while the left was in a supposedly acceptable range at 2.7V.
Even after I put in a fresh set of batteries -- these are not cheap by the way, $20 for
four at my local Walgreens -- the problem persisted.
This seemed to be the same category of issue another user on the Discord channel ran into.
No idea if they ever got it resolved.
Because of the other problems, I didn’t have a chance to test battery life, but the
discord had some people claiming less than a week of life if they didn’t manually switch
the boards off after every use.
You don’t really have to do this with any other wireless device out there, and the off
switch being inconveniently located between keys just adds insult to injury.
On the issue of dongles, we have a PCB with two USB ports each containing a Logitech Unifying
Receiver.
The Atmega32u4 is actually located on the dongle itself, rather than either of the halves,
so you actually program the dongle, not the keyboards.
There must be some kind of intermediary translation layer here.
There’s been reports of this getting very hot, and I can confirm that.
It’s hot enough that I wouldn’t want to leave it plugged in for long.
So for four hundred dollars shipped, I’m left with a bricked board that I can’t use
in any capacity.
Even if someone were to design a replacement PCB for this, they would need to figure out
some way to route cables, and even if it was a wireless design, it would be limited to
that coin cell due to an absolute lack of space under the PCB.
At least in my experience, wireless keyboards designed by hobbyists have been riddled with
problems of impracticality and unreliability.
When I saw the pitch with Logitech’s proven technology, I assumed it would be a plus,
but clearly, there’s more to designing wireless systems than the chip itself.
So now, when I buy a wireless keyboard, I make sure to check that there is a backup
wired connection option, because in the hobby, when something like this goes wrong, nobody
will help you.
I think my next step with this is going to be to handwire it with the brains hanging
out on the outside.
Seems like it’ll be pretty involved so who knows when I’ll get to it, but it’s a
real shame that the Unigo66 couldn’t work out.
If any of yall are planning to make a replacement PCB for it, please let me know.