Today we have the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, or UHK.
Pretty interesting looking one we have here, I’m always for unique boards, you know,
it just gives us more choice, but yeh, this one in particular has a bunch of cool stuff.
Inside the box we have a kind welcome card.
A bunch of screws.
A mini-USB cable.
A coiled cable to bridge the two pieces.
Underneath the board we have a bunch of feet that are super important to the use of the
board.
And here’s the board itself.
Feels pretty decent in the hands with minimal flex.
I have the blue version, but it also comes in black, orange, and red.
Personally I think black looks the nicest.
But of course this thing splits into two.
And they actually do join together properly, it’s not like a loose friction fit.
So we have quite big alignment holes and pins, AND magnets to make it super solid.
And these connections here do allow the two pieces to be used without the bridging connector,
but to also allow you to connect additional modules.
These are probably the most eye catching parts if you’ve seen promotional stuff, unfortunately
they’re not available just yet, and they’re currently listed at 60 bucks, which is quite
a bit of money, like you can buy a whole other mech for that much, but damn they look awesome.
All of them feature a way to move your cursor.
Personally I have a trackpoint on my Thinkpad laptop, so that looks like a very tempting
future purchase.
I’m not sure how well a touchpad of that size will fare, and I’ve never been a trackball
user myself, but they’re cool as well.
It looks like those 3 modules only fit on the right hand side, which I guess makes sense
as we tend to use our right hand for those.
So the key cluster module is for the left side.
I’ve had this board for a while, so I’m pretty keen for these modules to finally come
out as it really does make it a unique board.
I also did receive the palm rests.
Really nicely made from beech wood, the finish is smooth as well.
And the wood is attached to a solid steel plate.
Looking at the bottom of the board, there’s a bunch of holes and threads for the palm
rests and the flip up feet.
There’s 8 spots for the feet, and you can change the direction of them depending on
what you want to do.
Positive tilting is pretty much what we see on all keyboards.
Negative tilting is interesting, and it’s just about reducing that wrist angle, and
the palm rests are crucial for this if you’re not able to float your wrists for long periods.
It also helps if you’re quite a bit higher than your desk to make everything feel more
natural.
Combined with angling the pieces inwards, which again tends to more natural arm and
wrist positioning, I find it quite comfortable.
However I feel a lot of people will go with a tented configuration, which angles the pieces
upwards towards the middle.
If you just rest your hands on the table, your hands naturally won’t be just flat,
but come up a bit.
And for me, I found this the most enjoyable, and I always have liked using tented boards
in the past and you don’t often get to experience it, but paired with angling the pieces inwards
it’s a great combination.
Everything just feels more natural and less cramped, and it just feels like how it should,
but also it just looks the super cool in my opinion.
However when tented, you can no longer attach the two pieces together.
It takes a bit of effort to change between configurations, but that’s the beauty of
it, you can change it to suit your needs.
This is a 60% keyboard, so we have basically just the main area.
The layout is quite a bit different.
I do have the ISO version which splits the left shift.
But we have a shorter 1.5u backspace, 1u pipe key.
1.75u enter.
2.25u right shift, and right control.
So basically everything on the right side edge has been shortened, which enables them
to make the two halves more similar in size, because you can’t really equally split a
normal keyboard, like the Mistel MD600 is split, but the right side is quite a bit longer.
With this, it is still longer, but only slightly.
And the bottom row features 1.25u keys here.
The mod and space keys are 1.75u.
A little tough to replace everything, but certainly doable, and we’ll do that at the
end of the video.
And that may be tempting because these are about 1mm thick ABS caps and have laser etched
legends, so they won’t be durable overtime which is a little disappointing.
So they’ve built in a bunch of functionality to this layout.
First of all, we can change between Qwerty, Dvorak, and Colemaks layouts and it will show
on the display.
And being a 60% board, we of course have all of our missing keys on the mod layer, and
the keycaps have sub-legends for those.
To access them you just hold down the mod key.
The cool thing about having a split spacebar is that you always have access to it.
So by default it’s on the left spacebar, AND the right click button.
They’re quite well hidden but we do have these two extra buttons neatly built into
the case, and they just feel like heavy mouse clicks.
By default, they just mirror the spacebars.
However we can customise everything in the UHK Agent software.
So right off the bat I changed space to the left key.
I’m a caps lock user, so I moved the mouse key to the second pipe key.
All very easy to do and highly customisable.
You can also record macros and assign them, but yeh, the mouse function.
Personally I didn’t find it useful, you know, I have a mouse, so I never really used
it.
But I feel that the built in click buttons on the bottom would be useful for left and
right click, but yeh, hardly used it.
It’s available in an interesting array of keyswitches, like Cherry MX Green and Clears
aren’t often seen.
And then the standard Kailh switches, which again aren’t seen too often, with Kailh
Box switches being very popular.
I got the Cherry MX Clears, since I don’t think I have an MX Clear board.
They’re a medium to heavy weight tactile switch, so it has a bump, but no click.
Very scratchy in its stock form, like super scratchy, but that’s just how they are,
and kind of take away from its tactility.
I actually quite like the board, so if I can be bothered, I’ll eventually swap the switches.
There are only 2 stabilised keys on the board, and they sound fine.
There is a bit of a metallic ping, at least with the configuration I have, but it’s
not really noticeable.
But otherwise, the board feels solid to type on.
Let’s quickly take it apart.
They have a guide on their website which is great.
And also just a whole lot of information on everything about the keyboard.
They even show how to repair stuff, and mod guides which is pretty cool.
The bottom plastic shell is pretty basic with plastic standoffs, so be careful you don’t
over tighten your screws.
I also was wondering why there were 4 extra brass threads up top, apparently you can mount
stuff there, don’t know what, but they’re there.
The plate is made from 1.5mm steel, and is folded at the front.
Super solid and gives the keyboard its heft and rigidity.
Here’s the PCB, with everything nicely labelled.
Yes, to replace the keyswitches, you will need to desolder, which I hope to do in the
future.
Also, there are spots for LEDs for each key, so maybe I’ll do that too.
And that’s the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard.
Very unique, there’s obviously a lot of work that’s been done to have all this extra
functionality and customisability with the board.
There’s a lot of different parts, and the addition of those extra modules are really
exciting.
It’s something that I just haven’t seen too much of, and I’ll definitely pick up
a trackpoint module when it becomes available.
But with that comes a lot of non-standard stuff, which requires more R&D to achieve
what they have.
And that is reflective in the price.
So just for the board it's 275USD.
Another 75 for the palm rests.
And the modules are currently at 60.
So yeh, pretty pricey, but I do understand it.
But whether it’s worth it is ultimately up to you.
Well, obviously as with most things.
Although at this price, the keycaps are subpar, and they’re somewhat difficult to replace.
And the switches are also subpar in my opinion, and that’s one of the issues I have with
premium prebuilts, is that the switches don’t scale up with the rest of the board, and it
takes quite a bit of work and effort to replace them, not to mention costs.
However, I like to keep an open mind, there’s a bunch of unique stuff, the modules in particular
make it even moreso, aesthetically it grabs your attention, and that’s what it has going
for it.