326: Quantumly Entangled Keyboard Switches

Right, I love it when technology's fun. Yeah, that's nice as opposed to the alternatives, which are many. I mean, look, there's a lot of alternatives, you know, when ring camera is like Hey man, we can, you know, turn over your footage to help people find lost dogs and also, you know, help ice. That's that's bad. But, you know. Sometimes technology's good. I was watching the Olympics. You know, I like to see how things change every four years and

Yeah, the winter Olympics are always good'cause it's you know, it's the death sport Olympics, not the like, you know, who can go faster and jump higher Olympics. Going faster and jump high jumping higher can also be a death sport. I mean for what it's worth but fair.

But one of the things that's happened over the last like two or three Olympics is is that drones have gotten real good. So yeah, we used to cover drones over at Tested and and I've spent a fair amount of time with them over the years. And they started out as a thing that people would use instead of like boom shots. So they'd use them like instead of crane shots and stuff like that that were relatively static.

I want you to watch this video I just sent over. It is footage of people barreling down the mountain at a hundred kilometers an hour in the alpine downhill, the the death sportiest of snow skiing races, I think. And uh they have little micro drones that have really good four K cameras. The video quality on this particular one is bad. When you watch it on the broadcast, it looks fabulous. of the drones just tracking the racers as they're going a hundred kilometers an hour down the hill. And

It's kind of incredible. They're using them all over the place. I was watching The Louge yesterday. And the drone operators are flying the drones down the luge track just behind the racers, so you get like an over the shoulder third person video game view. people going the lose track at a hundred miles an hour. Do you think this is definitely human operated? It's not this is not like some kind of computer vision motion tracking, image tracking thing.

So I don't know for sure. So like there that's definitely a technology that exists. You can buy drones that will you like throw up in the air when you're going ski and then they'll track you on the way down the mountain. Um, I I kind of assume that's the case for the lose track. Watching the mistakes that happen on the downhill, I think it's probably not because I think they pick up the they they catch them on the way over the ridge when the drone would take a minute to acquire them.

Uh, and I think they're at least human operated for part of it. Sure. I believe that. It's wild and it's very cool and it made me happy and it's been fun because like last time they they did they weren't doing this and the footage from the drones looked crappy and like The drones advancing, the cameras advancing. It's all good, man. I I wanna see a drone for the drone.

I w You wanna w you want a drone operator, Joe? I mean I'm kinda like, yeah, I mean sorta take or leave the winter sports stuff, but I would absolutely love to see the drone in action. I wanna say like like how micro is micro here when we're talking about a micro drone. So I'm from what I could have seen in the other shots, because when they're doing the head on shots, you sometimes catch the drone behind it looks like they're two hundred and fifty millimeter drone.

That's a s wow. Well no no no. It's like they're like the size of a shoebox, basically. That's yeah, but that's still way I've I thought m we might be talking like the size of a dog. I don't know why a dog is my size reference here, but you know, like something the size of a s like a coffee table or something, like a s I' I I that's way smaller than I expected. They they're definitely using like micro cameras, like D like GoPro style size cameras or DJI style cameras.

Um, they're definitely not big giant octo quads. You can hear'em and they're they're they sound like little mosquitoes, which is usually means smaller propellers going faster. But yeah, the the these are the ones the my hunch and I I haven't found a a tech article explaining how they're doing it yet'cause drones are boring now and people don't write about that anymore.

Um, I haven't found an article talking about the drone pilots and the drones. Um, but my hunch is that they're the like like the racing class.

that we used to go to like industrial sites in South City to watch people Zoop through like pipes and broken windows and shit like that in abandoned warehouses. Yeah. I I didn't watch the Super Bowl this year, but we talked about it on the Ramblecast this week and I meant I meant to ask Vinny and Alex and did not think to if there were any kind of obvious drone shots at that.

Uh, they had drone shots in the halftime show. They definitely do some drone shots of like the outside of the stadium and stuff like that. I didn't notice they use that spider cam. Uh, in in all the major stadiums. Yeah, I mean that that's the thing that's on like a tether though, right? Like a zip line. Well it's on like four it's tethered to corners to the car to the op like the corners of the of the field, basically at the top of the stadium. Still physically connected to something though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flying independently flying cameras buzzing around at a sports game is like that's not even some future shit. That's like some Star Wars shit. Yeah, kind of, right? Like And yet it's just here. The only difference is that we are using typical rotor what's the term? No repulsor lift. It's not not whatever the hell a repulser lift is. Uh so we're not quite there yet, but it's like effectively the same thing. But yeah, it's it's um and it's funny'cause like

They're not filtering out the noise of the drones from the broadcasts, which I was surprised by'cause that would be pretty easy to pull out, I think. Mm. Yeah, sort of. Um but no, you just hear the drones buzzing, which is which is kind of how you know that a drone shot's coming. It's nice. That's yeah. The future is here. Unevenly distributed. Sometimes it's cool.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I am Brad. Brad, it's early in the morning. I am a sleepy boy. As it often is around these parts. And by these parts I mean this podcast. It's true. This is a morning pod. Like I've always wanted to have an evening podcast. I've never had an evening podcast podcast before. No, thank you. Like I I think I think um I am out of words by the evening. I've often thought it would be fun. Like I used to love doing the late night PUBG streams.

And watching how weird everybody gets at about eleven o'clock at night. Oh sure. Like like a stream, a video game stream, totally fine. You can get sloppy, and I don't mean sloppy then like inebriated sense, but you can just kind of be a mess on a video game stream and it's fine.

I I think doing like an Art Bell style call in show, like like take Art Bell and Car Talk and match them up into computer help. And I would I would like to do that show late at night. That's that might be fine. I don't know. Yeah, when people are having their computer problems. Because computer problems I find Almost always come at night. Yeah. This is this is a pr yes, yes, you're not wrong. This this is a pretty technical show though.

I kinda I like I like the mental sharpness and clarity of the early morning recording as opposed to the end of very end of day or evening recording. That's true. I so it's funny you say that though,'cause I do there's a couple of like daily games that I play every day. Um One of is uh the I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but one of the favorite ones is actually on LinkedIn. It's like a Sudoku chess puzzle, basically.

And they time you and tell you how you do versus your average and versus people on your leaderboard. I always do better if I do it at like eleven o'clock at night than at seven o'clock in the morning. Weird. Always. Weird. Yeah. I'm in bed before that at this point. Yeah, you see, we're both insomniacs at this point, but we're on opposite ends'cause I'm going to I can't go to sleep and you wake up early, I think. It's a staying asleep problem.

I've been reading so many books in a way that I haven't really since the start of the pandemic. So that's nice at least. Yes. Okay. R real quick before we have a topic this week, but before we get into it, I have a question for you. Speaking of computer problems and late night. Yeah.

And this is also a question that ultimately I'm gonna put to our audience'cause I could use some advice potentially. Do you think it's possible has has Windows gotten so shitty that it is now capable of eating another Windows? I don't know what that means, Brad. Okay, let me expand. Do you do you did you put a Windows inside another Windows?

things I don't want to touch my real install. Okay. Like for example the Logitech G Hub. Yeah. Like shit that you know is going to hook deep into Windows that you don't want to like gum everything up.

I feel like that's less of a problem in the twenty first century than it was twenty years ago. But yeah. It's maybe not as bad as uh I don't you know what a lot of that a lot of that type of vendor software is still pretty crappy. I d I so remember I did the testing on this last year. We did a video about it at PC World.

where I took a year old Windows install and then wiped it and then benchmarked it versus the busted window with the busted old Windows install and the performance was exactly the same. There's no performance degradation. Yeah. It's just jank incrustation. And and I also use that install for like, you know sketchy game mods that I might not trust or like installing installing twenty five year old Windows games that may not be well behaved.

Fair. Okay. In in terms of overwriting system files or whatever. So you you're kind of using it like a VM but it's bare metal'cause you're doing stuff that you require bare metal access to the same. Way. I fired up that Windows install last night to do some stuff. And it's way out of date. And I was like, I should get it on a modern Windows. I also use it for I have to update the um my NAS machine. Like there are some things like you can only update the Intel M E in Windows, you may know.

Which is a huge pain in the ass. Although actually there might be a Linux tool for that now. I'm not sure. Actually, yeah, the Linux firmware app will do that. But also you can do that if you on Asus boards and certain other boards, you can just upload the zip file that has the ME and the BIOS now.

And it'll do'em both at the same time. So some boards do that, some do not. Some do not. That that workstation board I got in there. Unfortunately the BIOS update instructions are like please update to Windows Intel M E version, blah blah blah before updating the spot. Yeah, it sucks. Anyway. Um if I could get that, if I could get the ME update working in Linux, I might actually just toss this drive and never use it again. But anyway.

I was in that dummy install, booted off this USB drive. I was like, I'll just let it Windows update to the twenty four H two or whatever it wants to do right now. Mm-hmm. So it's, you know, on a patched secure supported version of Windows. Walked away for a while, came back, the update had failed.

I let it reboot. It kind of unapplied the update for twenty minutes and then it was back to twenty three H two, whatever. I went to bed. I got up this morning. The Mellanox card in this machine does not work anymore.

Have you completely powered it all the way down? The this machine? Like drained the power and everything. Like I like unplugged the the power supply and hit the power button. Yeah, not turning off the power supply. I bet it got the firmware into a weird state. So it uh on the card? Yeah. Those cards have a lot of logic on'em. I don't know about that.

I had not considered that, but I don't know if that sounds likely to me. Anyway, like I can't believe I just gave you have you considered turning it off as advice? That might be worth a shot. Basically I looked in event like none of my none of my network mounts over that that's the forty gigabit card I use for that direct link to my NAS. None of the network mounts worked this morning.

And I looked in EventViewer, and that card was just Windows was trying to initialize that card and failing over and over in a five second loop infinitely. So my guess is you have to rebuild the external Windows drive as a um W using the Windows to go thing in order to get it to work. And I haven't been able to get it to work. I haven't been able to get Windows to go to work with anything past twenty four H two.

Interesting. Okay. I I had to use Rufus, the drive imaging tool that has an option for creating a portable, like an external Windows install. Uh here is a rub that I didn't mention. I believe this may be possible that at some point in that update process, you know, it A big Windows update updates or reboots like three, four times, right? Yeah.

My refind is set up to give me the boot menu and if I don't hit any keys, boot into when my regular windows after ten seconds. At one point in the middle of all those reboots of the external install. I wasn't around and it booted into regular Windows instead. So then yeah, did it hose the w regular windows too? Could that update process have touched the regular Windows install in any way? I don't think so. I don't think so for sure. I also don't think so, but the way

The way it hands stuff off during the upgrades and installs from sleep and fastboot and all that. Oh, I don't know if Fastboot's turned off on the portable windows actually. If it's not, that'll do it every time. Ooh, I didn't think about that. Yeah. Well, rebooting is supposed to always be a reboot. It's just shut down. That's not a reboot. That's not a shutdown. Right. But yeah, that that's so I I guess report back next week. Let's yeah, let us know how it goes.

I bet that the Windows upgrade got your machine you got got your card in a weird state and it hasn't been able to recover and power cycling will do it. Well you might have to remove the board and take it back out. This is like this has been multiple instances of me uninstalling it in device manager and letting it. No, I mean physically remove it from the machine. I I've had problems before that solved when I pulled the CPU and rebut the CPU in the socket.

Like it's stuff's weird. Interesting. Power lingers. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what doesn't linger? What's that?

Magnetic switches. Mm. Wait. No, they don't. Yeah, that that actually that works. Yeah, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with that one. Uh that's what we're here to talk about today. Yeah. There's been a little bit of uh it's been uh magnetic switches have had a moment. They've been around for a really long time, but uh we're starting to see them in more places in keyboards and mice and stuff like that. And uh we thought it was a good time to talk about it.

Uh, how they work, what they are, what kind of technology happens inside them, and then what it's like to actually use them a little bit on on a couple of the the the newer devices that use them. So you've been putting hands on a fair number of magnetic switches from the sound of things? I have paws on keyboards and mice uh i in the last few weeks. So yeah, lots lots of stuff to talk about. Yeah. And these these have been out there in I I feel like Joysticks. Thumbsticks.

In controllers were the first place I really started hearing about these, Hall effect and so forth. You may have heard the phrase, like that's been around for several years now. Well Hall Effect has been around Hall Effect is a ancient tech like ancient theory. I I don't I don't yeah, I don't I don't mean in concept. I mean like you've been seeing them show up in actual consumer products in a way that is being promoted and and is visible for a few years now.

Particularly honestly, a lot of this for most people is downstream of joystick drift on things like the Switch Joy-Cons. That's it. So Um, the the main difference we first we should talk about how regular switches work. So like a a keyboard switch or a mouse switch. Typically is a is an enclosure that contains a couple pieces of metal and when you push down on the switch part of the of the device, it buckles one of the pieces of the metal until it touches the other one.

And depending on how that mechanism con is constructed, they can have just a bump, they can make a noise, they can be silent and just kind of push all the way down. Um there's a bazillion ways to make those and the the the proliferation of keyboard switches after the Cherry patent war ran out has has

Yeah, there are you can literally get hundreds and hundreds of different times of of keyboard switches these days. Yeah. That's just just important here. It is a it is a mechanical action that is producing a physical electrical circuit. Yeah, and a physical physical contact between the two places.

And that buckling that happens when you press the switch down tends to cause um uh mechanical stress on the on the on a piece on a physical item which will cause it to break over time. Wait, when you say buckling or wait. Yeah. The metal's not bending. Yeah. Is it? Every ac every actuation. It's wow. Yeah, because you're pushing a thing down that makes the that makes the metal bend until it touches the other piece of metal. Huh. Interesting. Yeah.

Wait, as a as a design as as an intentional design, not not not as not as just a side effect of metal touching metal that is with stress on it. No, yeah. Interesting. I didn't mean to. Yeah, so so um uh magnetic switches use a variety of different techni uh techniques or effects.

to um do the same thing but with no physical electrical contacts. So like a keyboard switch that has a that's a a magnetic keyboard switch will have the same basic shape mechanism, mainly so that you can use the same kind of keycaps and they fit in the same places. And they're the right stability for a keyboard. But instead of having two wa two pieces of metal that touch each other and close a close a circuit.

Uh a magnet just moves up and down on the post that moves up and down through the switch. Now, this is great. There's no physical contacts to wear out the mechan either in the mechanism of the switch or in the space between the switch and the keyboard, right? You know, when you have those

Those those hot swappable switches, you jam the little copper wires in and they can bend or or wear out or get corroded or whatever. Um The other benefit of this is that a lot of the stuff that was previously tied to hardware, like the actuation point for the switch. is software configurable. So you can control stuff like bounce back and actuation height and w when the switch closes, like when the when the mechanism uh when the mechanism stops reporting a signal.

Uh when you're lifting your finger back up off of a keyboard press, for example. Sorry, I I may have lost the thread here a little bit. How does it how does it gauge height? This is it's not just a binary on off yes no we'll talk about that. Yes, no, it has crossed the boundary, no it has not.

Yeah, no, no. It's it's uh the so the boundary is a software configurable thing. What the way the sensors work, both Hall Effect and TmR, we'll talk about how b what both of those are and how they work more in a minute. Um but yeah, they they have analog signals. So like In a magnetic keyboard, if the software is set up right, is essentially an analog device that you're putting thresholds on for when the presses trigger. So um

And they do that. So I mean, let's just jump to it. With Hall Effect sensors, there's a little transducer in the in the sensor, the thing that's mounted on the keyboard. So the sensors typically are on the keyboard, the magnets are typically on the switches'cause the magnets are moving. And a Hall Effect sensor has a transducer that's in the integrated circuit and

The changes in magnetic flux around it change the amount of current that flows through that transducer. Can you define what a transducer is for it's like a little antenna, basically, for all intents and purposes. It's just a conductor that's very, very thin, so it it reacts Like the the current that flows through it changes. The hall effect it says that In magnetic fields, changing flux will change the amount of current that moves through Okay.

A a thing. That's how it's measuring variable gradation then and and how hard you're pressing. Yeah. So the amount of voltage that goes through it changes based on where the magnet is in the field. And and so inherently it doesn't know that. Often uh people use hall effect sensors and things like RPM meters for industrial equipment or or like

bicycle rotation counters that give you a speedometer for your bicycle. Sometimes we'll put a Hall effect sensor up on like your back fender and a magnet on the rim of the one of the rims of the bike. And then you tell it how big your tires are and then it knows how far you're going and how fast you're going based on how many times that magnet hits the hits the Hall effect sensor. I wanna say we use them on the early MakerBots when we were building those

to determine the the top and the bottom of the of the print uh of the print area, right? Um so anyway Uh it yeah, the but the important thing is analog signals and you get a range and you can c calibrate them based on positioning.

Uh, there's a lot of math there. Especially in noisy environments like a keyboard where there's a million of these switches and a million little magnets right next to each other. This was my biggest question about this thing and I typed it into this doc until I saw you had addressed it elsewhere and then removed that question. But yes, it's

a situation where there are upwards of a hundred and four or a hundred and ten, depending on your keyboard layout, several dozen to a hundred different tiny magnets, all very tightly packed and adjacent to each other, so Is there not an issue with like bleeding magnetic fields from one to the next? Like

signal kind of crosstalk, how does how does it correct for all of that? Well, so there is, but but because of the way um magnets work, the field the field when the keys are all up is always the same, right? And then when you press down on the on a switch, it's the same. When you press down on the switch and the neighboring switch, that's a measurable change in the flux for both of the switches around it.

And the magnets in the switches are really, really small. So the fields the their impact on the fields around them is relatively limited, is my understanding. That was my guess was either either either or both of the fields are tiny and it's not a huge problem, or they correct for it in terms of signal strength. Well, but also like if you change switches in your keyboard or even I assume change switches from one spot to another.

Then you have to actually um uh recalibrate the keyboard, which I uh I haven't done yet. I assume that's just pressing a bunch of keys. Interesting. Yeah. It's just a lot of quick brown fox type stuff for a while until it's happy. I don't know. You want me to try it? Sure. What could go wrong? I didn't think to do that. Um so anyway, the but the point is

Because it's analog, you can control things like actuation height and like when the key press lets off, like when you're lifting your finger back up. So the activation height and the release height don't have to be the same in one of these mechanical keyboards. That makes sense. Yes. It's on at a higher height than it lets off of, is what you're saying. Exactly. Or vice versa. I guess you could set it either way. So when I do a calibration, I'm calibrating my E switch right now.

I press the selected key on the physical keyboard all the way down and then I press the start button and it just says, Oh, it's calibrated. So there's nothing to uh it's just looking for what Wh which sensors detect flux change or what the sensor underneath it detects when it changes. All right. Well, we'll get into more of the hands on toward the end. Yeah. For the specific keyboard you're testing.

So okay, so there's there's also this other thing that you hear about in the in the game in the joystick, JoyCon drift. Uh world. Uh, which are TMR sensors. That's short for tunnel magnetoresistance. Yeah. The first place I saw this was um I think it's like eight bit does last couple of controllers.

Yeah, they're their ultimate Bluetooth twos, I think, are both TMR set six. They're starting to move to TMR instead of Hall and they they definitely but of course they do kind of talk it up as these are better than Hall. This is the next generation of this thing. I don't know how accurate that is, but

So that's that's accurate. That's fair. Um, this is a newer effect that's been disc that was discovered in the seventies versus the eighteenth century uh nineteenth century, I guess, eighteen hundreds. Um and uh they use less power. They measure the change in resistance of a thin insulator between two ferromagnets on an integrated circuit. So imagine two magnets with something that insulates between them.

And the tunneling mag T T MR effect, the tunneling magnetoresistance effect says that in a magnetic flux field, electrons will tunnel across that insulator and into the other from one magnet to another. And that's a measurable effect. 'Cause you can measure the resistance of that um of that of that insulator. Yeah. Speaking of measurable effects, I'm I'm sure you don't have numbers in front of you, but I wonder if the uh the savings on electricity required to drive these is meaningful across

Again, somewhere between sixty and a hundred switches on on a especially if it's a wired keyboard, it doesn't matter, but like I use a wireless keyboard and I'm wondering if I wonder if that many switches makes a meaningful difference to battery life to have TMR overhaul. From what I can tell, it matters much more on small integrated circuits that are being used on smaller batteries. The batteries in my scene keyboards are relatively large. Yeah. So fair. Um

So uh the bigger the bigger thing is that they're faster and more uh uh uh faster and and more precise than the Hall Effect sensors generally. Faster, more precise, and less power is a pretty

Uh compelling combo. Although And they're quantum. So they use a quantum effect. The tunneling can't be described in classical physics. It's only a quantum effect. So using quantum mechanics would use TMR sticks. So these are quantumly entangled I don't know how entangled they are, but it the it was very clear the articles I read about this all described this as quantum effects and I went and looked at it and I dug in further and I was like, Oh right.

Electrons jumping, yeah, that is quantum. Electro hmm, okay, that's not entanglement. If it's one if it's one particle moving as opposed to two different particles and influencing each other at a bizarre distance, then that's not Yeah. Ask me anything about quantum mechanics. Um but it but so the TMR effect is the same thing that's been in modern uh uh hard drive heads for like fifteen years at this point.

Uh the ones that float above the surface of the disc on a cushion of air. Um so yeah, the switches measure the cha the physical setup for these switches is the same. The sensors on the board, the magnets on the switch. Uh, the switch measures the change in resistance w in that insulator, which is faster and like I said, uses less power and more precise. When you say faster, are we talking on the order of nanoseconds? I don't know.

Microsoft. I couldn't find that answer. I looked for that and I think it's just I think it's I think it's not on a human scale faster, would be my was was my read. Probably milliseconds versus microseconds or milliseconds versus nanoseconds or something like that. Or some insane.

Yeah, I want to say there was a Counter-Strike tournament that was sponsored by Intel and everybody's really raw because they put mid-range CPUs into it. So the machines were only getting 180, 200 frames a second. Yeah. Um now the the the problem with the TMR sticks is the

sensors are relatively new. The IC sensors are relatively new. That means they're more expensive. So when I was looking at like replacement sticks for a dual sense, for example, uh, which you can buy on Amazon, uh, four-pack of for uh hall effect sensors was twelve dollars. A sorry, I have a four pack written here, but it's a two pack of TMR sticks was twenty bucks. So significantly more expensive. That's that's what, three dollars versus ten a stick? Yeah, basically. Um

I was going to ask something else. Oh, is this mostly relevant in the context of a dual sense? Are those sticks and the um circuit board integrated together or is that just the stick? Because on a dual sense you have to solder if you don't have that whole contraption, I believe? So this was this was to desolder these were units that would desolder the old sticks. And re solder on the new sticks and you'd re you'd replace the stems and the caps from your board, I think.

stick stick replacement on Joy Cons is d is pretty dead simple as these things go, but yeah. So so we should talk about why um Like in the old days thumbsticks and joysticks used p potentiometers, which are like sensors that measured

the bend of a material inside the change of the resistance based on the b bend of a physical material usually. There were a bunch of other ways that they could do that, but that was the more common one. Um modern thumbsticks in like s the switch and the dual dual sense.

have two touch surfaces. They have a mechanism in there that has uh that r that pivots on both axes and it moves these little they're like little virtual thumbs basically that move on a little touch surface back and forth on a linear way. on the X and Y axes and those sent those those pushers push down on these touch surfaces and that's what detects the movement, those those touch surfaces. Cause hey, this is weird, but touch surfaces are very inexpensive to make now. Yeah.

Uh weird. Guess what else? They also wear out as they grind against each other over time. Well, so they do wear out with this grind against each other time. In the switches case, it was more often that dust in particulate got into there and got stuck on that touch surface.

and would interfere with the with the touching part of it. And then the software couldn't cope with that once it got beyond a certain level of dirtiness. Yeah. That's speaking of I don't know if this is this the time to say this, speaking of software coping with physical effects, physical anomalies. Yeah, I I mean I think let's let's um

The fact that the shorting out was a problem is what started this whole conversation about magnetic switches, I think, in a lot of things. But yeah, so let's talk about software fixing your other problems. Yeah, like my my first question about

these when we were putting these notes together is do magnetic switches fix debouncing, which is a Phenomenon I have become acquainted with on this podcast over the last couple months, as my as my as my relatively inexpensive but decent keychron started registering a whole bunch of extra inputs.

Yeah. And then I as I talked about recently, I updated the firmware on it thinking that would not do anything, and then in fact it did everything. Uh, in the sense that they tweaked the debouncing algorithm in this thing, so

The yeah, the debouncing the bouncing happens because the switches aren't the connections aren't perfect, right? Yeah, the the short version so I l I looked it up and from what I've I read the short version is that yes, these do basically eliminate the bouncing effect. But yes, when you when you are slamming two pieces of metal together with a decent amount of force I assume it's everything from the amount of force you're applying to like tiny variations in the Shape of the metal.

It's just the impact. Yeah, I was gonna say on the hard impacts especially, especially if you're a hard typer. The switches can vibrate on and off of each other a little bit even. The the contacts. And uh enough for, you know, current to flow and not flow multiple times per key press. And so that's what bouncing is and that's what software and and more often firmware is correcting for.

Yeah, typically I looked on the firmware for my like control drop and it when you compile it yourself rather than using one of the precompiled binaries that they ship. then you can actually change the debounce settings in in the firmware. The the the newer firmware I put on this Keychron also exposed a a debounce setting and I think it's at like five milliseconds. From by default right now, which has basically fixed everything.

Oh that's good. Yeah although although it did lead me to ask, since we're talking about this situation, it it did make me wonder where is the debouncing happening. Like obviously it's happening in firmware because we're talking about that and we can see the setting exposed for it, but it also made me wonder if

the th the software receiving the input is doing any debalancing? Probably not. Whether OS. Also what I looked up is the the Yes, and in most cases on operating systems they have to account for a wide range of of input devices, not just highly precise gamer keyboards. So probably most generic USB keyboard drivers and things like Windows and Linux are doing some amount of smoothing for that stuff. And the reason this came to mind is that I've been in my UEFI a lot lately.

And I was seeing a lot more like double arrow key presses in the UEFI than I would ever see in Windows. Is this after the update? Yeah, this is in the last like week that I've been in there, like I just I would be arrowing up and down through the menus and it would jump a little bit here and there. Can you increase that de bounce more or is that a configurable option?

Uh yeah, I can I can tweak it more. But the the point is I I it seems like maybe the operating system does a little bit of its own smoothing on top of whatever's happening in hardware or firmware. I mean it's entirely possible. I mean they remember you like Windows has to account for everything from like

terrible scissor keys on laptops to like dome keys to all sorts of other stuff. So you know there's gonna be a generic keyboard driver that you're going through that's gonna handle some of that stuff. Yeah. So

Anyway, there's other stuff that's a side effect of the of these switches too, right? Like Um Razor and Wooting both have magnetic keyboards that use features that are banned from use in Counter Strike and Overwatch and games like that. Um, the razor has a thing called Snap Tap. I think I think uh Wooting calls it something tappy or tappy, tappy tappy or something like that. And the idea is that when you flip that on, it only prioritizes your last hit input, so it releases the previous hits.

Which doesn't matter in a lot of games, but in a game like Counter Strike where you have movement inertia and your gun accuracy is directly ti is is goes way, way bad the moment you are uh gets better the moment you stop moving. Mm-hmm. Counter Strike pros do a thing where the uh called where they do cross inputs. or opposite inputs uh called snappings. It's it's

some s simultaneous natural opposing or something. The idea is if you're pressing D to strafe right and you wanna stop, then you don't just let off D, you also press A for a split second. as you're letting off letting off D. And it's something that like that getting the timing on is one of the things that separates Counter Strike mortals from Counter Strike Gods, right? Yes. Also, you know, as with so much of what we talk about here, it all goes back to Quake.

It does.'Cause remember remember the movement in Quake One and the amount of momentum you had when you let off the movements? Well and when you did diagonals, yeah, of course. So uh anyway. I can see why this might be a problem in the professional scene.

Yeah, so the feature that they added, um, basically prioritizes your last used input, which means it removes any overlap between the key presses, which will one of the put things you have to learn how to deal with on any new keyboard when you're when you're playing Counter Strike at a high level.

And it only replaces replace uh reports rather the last key that you press even while another key is still pressed so if you're straight right. Yeah, you can effectively just interrupt your movement by hitting the opposing direction. Exactly. Um, and I'm gonna say I turn it on on this keyboard.

I fired up Counter Strike. I immediately was able to stop and get like something I've never been able to do before. I was able to stop and get the perfect headshots with an AK, like tap, tap, tap, no problem. It was wild. Um, and that was after about five minutes of practice. So I understand why they've said, Hey, don't use these.

Uh it seems like they're able to detect it in software, so they are issuing bans on on using this kind of stuff. So don't do it. Like uh like they're kicking you from games. It's not like a backband. Okay. They basically you get a message that says, Hey, don't do that. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Like just just preventing you from playing the game with the device seems fine. If it hit l at the account level, that would maybe be a little much.

Yeah, and j and just to be clear, this is a thing you have to turn on in the firmware in the software for the for the keyboard. Like I had to log into the software interface and flip it on. They call it speed tap in the Asus software. I wonder I wonder if they're using like kernel level detection features.

'Cause it's this that seems like the kind of thing that would not be hard to spoof otherwise. You could like probably My guess is they're tracking timing. They're all kind Yeah, maybe maybe that's what it is. Also Wait, wait, but then but then you would start false positive catching people who are too good at this.

Well, my guess is that you don't do it in a precise in a like I my guess is that the timing is always the same every time when you use the feature and when a human does it, it varies by a couple of mic milliseconds. Uh I don't know. Uh all I know is that yeah, don't don't use these features or you're gonna get yelled at. It really the games that I've seen that it referenced are for different reasons. Overwatch, you can do it to completely change your mo movement and make you move like a like a

Like like like you have some sort of weird powers or cheating, actually. When you watch the videos of people using it in Overwatch, they literally look like they're cheating. Um, it apparently doesn't matter in Valorant because the movement inertia isn't the same in Valorant. You stop almost immediately when you let off. Um and yeah, I my understanding is that it's detected by heuristics, not by some sort of kernel level anti-cheat or something like that. Um So

And and just to be clear, you can use the keyboard, you just have to turn the feature off. That's that's the that's what the Oh yeah, and and per their rules you can still as long as you've got that off. Yeah, it must be a detection thing then if they're if they're if you can still play with that feature disabled but on that keyboard.

There's nothing fundamentally illegal about magnetic switches. It's the feature that lets you turn off the the other thing they do is they change the input at which the the key stops repr reporting input, but that's a little bit less of an issue. Um so okay.

I think that's everything. Uh people use these sensors in like all sorts of Hall Effect sensors are everywhere. Your fridge door likely has a Hall Effect sensor.

If it doesn't have a physical switch that turns the light on and off that you can see, if the light just turns on and off when it when it opens and and c turns off when it closes, that's almost certainly a magnet embedded in the door someplace. You can test it by getting a big magnet and running it around your fridge and seeing what happens.

Uh the but the place that we're mainly talking about are keyboards and mice. I haven't actually used I've used Hall Effect thumbsticks before, but not for any appreciable length of time. All of my game pads that I use are still

uh more or less stock. But I I'm kind of curious about swapping out the TMR sticks. I mean the for some TMR sticks and Hall Effect sticks. Uh I did read a couple of comparisons. Uh like there was a person who did the the TMR switch and uh did t basically put TMR sticks in one of his joysticks, in one of his gate dual senses and Hall Effect sticks in one of his dual senses.

And then reported the differences and the TLDR was they both seemed fine. Yeah. Uh yeah. I have to it sounds like the differences would be imperceptible to a human, but like the the less electricity and stuff is meaningful. Yeah, and I and I think Like this is one of those places where human perception is a spectrum and like there's definitely gonna be people out there that can tell the difference.

But for the most part, probably they're functionally identical. It is so f fucking frustrating to me that none of the console makers have embraced at least Hall effects. Which sounds if it's really that ubiquitous and commodified and like yes, it probably would I mean, of course it would add a little bit of manufacturing cost, but

As bad as stick drift particularly was on the Switch one and Sony's last couple of generations of controllers have also I don't know what Xbox has been doing. I had drift on some of my three hundred sixty controllers, but So my three C C controllers, the problem I had with them wasn't drift, it was that the dead zone got wobbly. So that so it would kind of jitter in the even if no you weren't touching the sticks.

I actually haven't any problems with dual senses. Um I haven't either, but i it's it's something you see a fair amount. I've never had a dual shock four or a dual sense, I don't think, develop drift, but but I do. That's why the stick replacements are fairly common. But it not as bad as Joy Cons. Those are absolutely the worst. And like I assume Nintendo just made the old fight club car crash recall versus settlement calculation.

I I think'cause you know,'cause you you remember they started um like a lifetime. I think it would the policy was lifetime on the switch one, right? They would replace

Joy-Cons with drift lifetime of the unit, not like one year warranty style. And I assume it's just the standard thing of hey, it's still cheaper for us to just fulfill RMAs on the people who will bother to RMA uh than it is than it is to take a I don't know what it is, fif somewhere between like fifty cent to three dollar extra cost per unit. produced kind of thing? It's uh y yeah. I mean

It seems like on the Switch two they sealed them better at least, so that you don't get as much dust and crap in there. But it my guess is that the Hall Effect sensors are significantly more expensive than the than the touchpad type sensors. It's a bummer though. It looked like

Yeah, it's I mean, it's nice that the aftermarket controller like this is why you should buy an eight bit dough controller instead of that eighty dollar pro controller. Um So okay, hands on time. Uh I've been testing the ROG Falcata, which is a split seventy five percent uh gaming keyboard. It uses uh the specific kinds of switches.

Like this the so one of the things that's important, just like in mechanical keyboard land, you have to match your switch with your keyboard. Most everybody uses the same standards for switches at this point. There are a handful of mechanical switches that are outside of like The Cherry MX three or five V

uh uh um supporter uh snap in plastic pieces and two connectors. When when you say standard, are you talking about physical form factor that would make them interchangeable in the same in the same keyboard? Yeah. Okay. So you can just kind of buy any brand of switch. More or less. There's like Cherry MX compatible switches and then there's some other stuff. Like um but but but we don't the other stuff is relatively small.

Um, with this, you need to make sure that the keyboards match your switch because the magnet placement matters. Like the Asus the Susseus keyboard and a couple others use magnets on the side of the of the capsule.

And uh some of'em use magnets on the center of the stem. Like they're they're all it's all over the place. So like if you have a wooding keyboard, you make sure you buy the wooding magnetic switches. If you have an Asseus keyboard, you make sure you buy the Asseus one. If you have the razor one, you buy the ra razor one. Um switch selection is dramatically lower than um

with mechanical keyboards because for obvious reasons. Yeah. Uh the most everybody is shipping what are effectively linear switches. So no bump, no click for kind of obvious reasons. Yeah,'cause the click is a mechanical process. And the switch actuates at at a configurable height. So like if you while you can move the actuation height, you'll never be able to move where that click happens.

So you don't probably wanna buy clicky switches for this until you figure out what height you want. And then maybe you find a clicky switch that aligns with the height that you like. I I don't know. Um you can get clicky magnetic switches for other keyboards. I haven't actually tried them. I don't think I would want that. But I'm also a linear keyboard switch guy. I like linears, I've I've so I've I've I've actually do people mix and match.

Sometimes people put different switches on their like their WASD and game keys. I got this keyboard as a tactile because that's all they had in stock. I thought I had never A, I'd never used one, so I had to guess at what I thought I would want, but I guessed that I would want um linear, but they only had tactile at the time, so I bought the tactile keyboard and later bought some

linear switches. But by then I have kind of decided that I liked tactile enough that I sort of mixed and matched. Like all my I think all my letter keys are linear currently and everything else is still a tactile. Yeah, I like I like linear just because of noise. I like to be able to type a little bit while I'm while I'm on the microphone here. Yeah. Um but but yeah, I like look.

If I didn't do podcasts and didn't use my computer with the microphone on, I would have the clickiest, loudest, most obnoxious fucking switches you've ever heard. Yeah. There's a l you know, there's a lot of things about one's computing habits that are that flow downstream of having to be on a microphone a lot. Yeah, give me give me a big thonky like I want something to sound like a model eighty, you know, just thonk thonk thonk. Um So yeah.

The switches the the there's right now two switches on the market for this keyboard, so I haven't tried the other ones. The they're they're they weren't in stock when I tried to get'em. What kind of pricing are we talking about on these? Did you basically the same. Yeah, I I looked up I I look at Keychron just because that's what I have, not that they're like the best or anything, but they a full set of like 110 or whatever was like thirty bucks for their

Hall line. So these are more in line with like a premium premium switch. Um when I looked at their uh let's see, what it what is it called? The T T C golden magnetic switches. They were like ten bucks, eight eight bucks for ten, I think. Ten switches. For ten switches, which is which is like Basically the same price I paid ten years ago for my silent bobas on my on my control. Now here's the bigger question. What is wearing out in the switches that necessitates more switches?

What do you mean? Like... On I mean on you know, on the the standard mechanical switches it's pretty obvious why they would wear out over time. Yeah. Like what is what is wearing down in the m in the magnetic switches that nothing. Well that's what I mean then. Why What are the scenarios in which we you would need replacements is what I'm asking? Oh, if you want like a stronger spring or a weaker spring, you want less travel distance or more travel distance, you want

Um so we're talking about buying switches that are that behave differently and not not just switches to replace the old worn out switches. Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. Okay, that's that's what I meant. The it's a it's a personal preference, not a not a like the the the things to wear out are the physical, mechanical interface of the plastic rubbing on the other plastic. And since they're usually prelubed.

Like they should last a really, really long time. Right. Um, the the I mean, I guess the magnet could fall out. I don't know. It seems like the magnet's pretty embedded in there though. So the weird thing about the switches like the switch industry and shambles here, like this is the

This is like the the razor blade seller suddenly not being able to sell more razor blades, right? I mean kind of. The keyboards are a little bit more expensive generally than the than a compara yeah comparable magnetic uh mechanical keyboard. Um, I think my my assumption is that we'll see more preference come up and people will start making more like tactile and

And clicky switches. That makes sense. Um the switches are really weird though, man, because you open you when you look at the bottom of'em, there's no there's no conductors. There's no like contacts that go into the into the keyboard. It's just like three or five plastic pins. Which is bizarre to me. It's all invisible. It's all invisible. You can't see electrons. Uh the the keycap interface is the standard cross though, so you can use more or less whatever key keycaps you want on it.

Um, it's louder than my control drop, but that that is with the help of friend of the show Nathan Edwards, I picked out some silent U4 Boba Whites for that years ago. And they have been consistently the quietest key mechanical switches I've ever used. There there are I believe there are quieter ones now that I don't think they make the the silent E four bobas anymore. Um

But uh like it's a little thunkier, it's a little clickier. I mainly when you bottom out the switches. Now, the weird thing about this keyboard is you don't have to bottom out the switches at all. Um like you like you literally you can just kind of graze your fingers across the top as if it's almost like playing a harp is what it feels like. Well that's configurable, right? You could configurable, yeah. To make you have to do that or close to it if you wanted.

Yeah, you can uh so there's both a this one has a knob on the side that lets you manually adjust the activation height and software. Nice. Oh wait. You still have to go into software. The knob just doesn't doesn't just do it. No the knob just does it. Oh, that does. There's like a series of LEDs on the side and you twist the knob and it goes up and down.

So you can make it hair trigger or bottom out uh depending on which one you want. It also has a web interface. So you go to the Asus Gearlink site and it connects to the to the USB H I D I looked to see what this what this spec is called. This is a thing that started the first time I saw it was with the via firmware uh the via QMK firmware programmer years ago. Yeah.

Um, but it it like I I've used some fractal stuff. There's a fractal headset that uses it now. There's a fractal um uh like fan hub and uh RGB controller that uses it now. Uh a couple of of uh of uh Asus devices use it.

Like it's really nice to not have to have a bunch of uh software running on them. Like it's it's nice to not have to use G Hub. I yeah, I th I think it I think it's probably still a net good both for not making you install a shitty software stack and also for being cross platform. Presuming presuming the like driver interface exists on other operating systems, you can do it on any of them. It it is it is a m it's mildly concerning.

If, for example, that company were to go away one day or just or even if the servers were down, like not being able to update your keyboard because they're web based configuration tool is suddenly unavailable is uh you know that sucks. There are downsides here.

Yeah. You would you would hope if they were going out of business they would like release some local option for continuing to be able to support your device, but who knows? Well so you can also like on this one at least, you can always use armory crate on Windows if you want. Uh, but once I added the U dev rule that gave my browser access or my my user access to the the web the USB device, I was able to use the

The the web tool on Linux with Chrome, no problem. Yeah. So my my Keychron has the same stuff. It uses QMK and and has they have a web based tool as well. I had to install some kind of open

I forget what it's called. It's a microcontroller driver stack probably for a teensy or whatever's in those one whatever's in those keyboards. I just cannot remember the name of that open source project, but it it supports like a bajillion keyboards, but I did have to install that to make the web interface talk to the keyboard, but

Yeah, the the thing that I th I don't know, I assume people know this. We talked about on the mechanical keyboard episode, but like a modern mechanical keyboard can have more compute than like a computer that you had in the nineties probably. Uh totally. There's like five I'd I'd have to look at the specs, but I n I know what ARM CPU is in this keyboard. Yeah, there there's a bunch there's a bunch of like homebrew projects that just use teensy's which are like

Or like r relatively cheap microcontrollers that also have an insane amount of compute on them for for what they are for something that costs ten bucks. That whole thing of compute getting small and and Relatively powerful. And that good. Yeah, like d just to be clear, I don't think the math to do like it's not like it's not like a an old dome.

uh plastic dome cap keyboard where the math on that is relatively simple. It's just closing circuits and measuring which circuits are closed and then sending the right signal to the motherboard. Like there's there's real math happening on interpreting the analog signals from from the magnets in the halls hall of access sensors and stuff like that. And that enables things like extra profiles, you know, different

Yeah. Different layout configurations for different OSs and stuff like that. Yeah. So this keyboard has multiple profiles. The interesting thing about actually using it is that It it depending on where you set the actuation in the dead zone. So uh this lets you set activation point at a millimeter distance from the bottom from the from the top of the uh the key, the zero the you know, the unpressed Uh point.

And you can set a dead zone where nothing happens. And you can set it on on both the top and the bottom. And you can do it per key. So like you can have different settings on, say, your ASDF keys or ASDW keys than you do on your other typing keys. Or

You mentioned profiles. It has on device profiles and you can switch between them. So you have different profiles for like hair trigger games and uh just you know, using your computer for typing. Um I tried a bunch of different actuations actuation points. And my initial thought was, oh, I want this to be very near the top. Cause like it turns out

the latency the input latency on a keyboard is mostly in the travel distance of the key, right? Sure. So you like you're if you're talking about I want to have microsecond or millisecond ac accurate key presses Having to bottom out that key is a travel of a couple of millimeters and that takes time. Now this instantly brings me to the question of when are we gonna start seeing switches with next to no travel on them? When are we gonna start seeing that?

They do low profile switches right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. I mean this this is a low profile keyboard, but they still have a fair amount of travel. I'm talking like I'm talking like millimeters. Like when when are Counter Strike pros gonna get to the point where they want like millimeters of travel on their keys? Sub millimeter tra so so the key travel on these keys is three point uh it's about

Four millimeters, I think. Okay. Three point five millimeters. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's that's like how long the stem travel is on most cherry style key switches. Uh, okay. Um I my guess is uh that the what you'll do is is set the keys to hit very near the top.

I found that almost impossible'cause I was kept triggering when I was just resting my fingers on the keyboard. Right. Um Well the other thing there though is that you still get very and this is for f again, this is the Counter Strike Pro problem. I would not care about this, but then you still have a variable amount of You'd have to train your fingers to only press so far because you would be wasting time on travel. You don't need to activate the switch. Well, that is a hundred percent.

Like that's part that's a big part of using these when you set'em to the hair trainer. That that's that's where that's where like just having a physical blocker in there to only have to depress the thing half a millimeter or whatever would come in. I mean I guess the so it would be easy to take something and make a like a ring that goes around the stem that prevents it from going further than X amount.

Um, I don't know that anybody's done that yet, but that would be wild to see. I'd be curious about that. I bet it's coming. I'm I'm sure. You're not wrong. Um Did this make me better at playing games? I don't probably not. I don't feel like it. Yeah. Uh is it nice to be able to control the actuation height for the switches? Yes, absolutely. It's I find myself bottoming out bottoming out a lot less when I'm typing fast.

And my typing I do have an occasional false positive where I where I hit a key just a little tiny bit too hard and it goes. Um but since that that activation deck actuation death depth is configurable What I did was I started high and just kept moving it down until I stopped having a bunch of false positives, like a tenth of a millimeter at a time. And I ended up at like one point five, one point eight. Um

for the k for for typing keys. Uh space bar I let bottom out. Yeah. E even if you never touch any of the configuration, like the ac actuation or activation height, I should say, or whatever, like this still seems like a a net gain. Yeah, when you when you factor in that you never probably never have to replace the switches, like they don't give out the way that mechanicals do and and so forth.

I think probably that the keyboard will last like uh by the time the keyboard is gross from being in close proximity to human, I'll I'll be ready to do a new keyboard. Just check it in the dishwasher. Ja, ja, ja. Don't, don't, don't, don't do that.

People used to do that. I know. I know. But the joke modern modern mechanical cube. This one has batteries in both sides. Yes. Yeah, that would be a bad idea. Um a couple other weird features on this that are kind of neat. Uh you can sp you can because it's a split. You can it has screw mounts on the bottom, uh, and you can tent it if you want. You can tilt, you can do a reverse tilt like the old comfort curve.

Um I I quite like it'cause I have it in like the normal traditional keyboard format when I'm typing and then I mean sorry, when I'm playing games, then when I'm typing I can angle it so I get a natural angle on the on the keys to type. Um Uh so generally pretty good. That that um that switch on the side you can use to alternate between a bunch of different things. It has like media controls.

You can tr control the the rapid trigger uh sensitivity, uh which which that that's a whole other feature we didn't talk about. But basically if you flip a switch on the front of the keyboard, it gives you uh the ability to to uh like make the type matic key press much, much faster. If that makes sense. So you you just keeps typing really, really fast. So a anyway, it's it the keyboard's nice. I I was kind of blown away by the keyboard. I was not expecting to be super impressed by it.

I also want to talk about the new Logitech uh mouse. It's the Logitech Superstrike X two. Uh it's a G Pro mouse. It's basically the same shape as my old uh G Pro uh Super Light, Super Light Two. Um it's a it's an ambidextrous shape, but only with thumb buttons for right handers.

Uh five five buttons, I guess. Two mi two regular buttons, the wheel that's clickable, and then two side buttons. Um And it uses their light speed stuff for up to eight thousand re refresh rates per second in in Windows, unfortunately, only. Um but what they've done is they've taken they put magnetic switches on the two main switch presses.

Um so your two main mouse buttons are magnetic switches now, and they've added a haptic uh bouncer that's kind of like uh the thing in modern trackpads that don't that aren't mechanical actu mechanically actuated now. Uh and It's a little bit different it gives you a lot of the same benefits as the keyboard, right? You can control the act actuation height for the switches. So like I can set it so I just barely graze my finger on the mouse and it clicks.

Yeah. Mouse buttons are not something I think of as having much or any travel on them. They're kind of on off, but I guess it depends on the mouse. There's travel, man. There's a there's a little bit of travel. It's or or you it's not like a keyboard where you can really control It like it clicks or it doesn't, kind of. Like you can there might be a little bit of variation in there, but it's not quite the same thing.

Yeah, it's like it's it's like if the keyboard is a three and a half millimeter travel This is a a half a millimeter travel on a mouse switch. I have one right here. I'm gonna pull out. And in fact, the feel of a mouse button is kind of what I was getting at with the the super shallow esports pro. Keyboard switch, right? You see that, I think it may be blurry, but

Like like basically basically keyboard keys that feel like mouse buttons and how hard they need to be depressed, that kind of thing. So you could make a keyboard with a bunch of these little tiny mouse buttons. I don't know how you'd get the keycaps on there.

Um but the uh the the there's a whole scene in the game in the in the high end mouse community. We've talked about the mouse review subreddit before where people are swapping out s their their stock mouse switches with increasingly specialized switches that are either like you said, really, really fast throw, um, really quiet, really uh like m more loud, different actuation points, the whole thing.

Um and this gives you again a software configurable version of that experience. Um unfortunately with this you have to do it all in the G Pro software. Um The big thing is that you need it turns out you need the haptic input on the mouse to know when you've clicked. Because otherwise the m the switches are so small and the travel distance is so short that without that click,

You don't know that you've clicked. You like build in like a mechanical click mechanism. Well, so that's what the haptic thing is. Well, I know that's what I mean. They like but I ask because on this G five oh two X I have It uses I think what they refer to as mechanical optical. Like they're optical in terms of signal sensing. Yeah. But I believe they just built a mechanical clicking mechanism in just to make them click. That would make sense.

But they didn't do that here for whatever reason. Well this is they have the haptic thing in in in place of that. So you like if you have the mechanical switch you couldn't adjust the haptic, like you'd still get the mechanical even with the haptic. So the haptics I'm still I've had it for four three or four days at this point.

I'm not sure how I feel about the haptics. The haptics feel really mushy compared to um if you think about how a mouse click feels, like like I'm gonna hold up to the microphone. And you can kinda hear it like there's an immediate you know exactly where it actuates or you know exactly where the click happens. Because it you feel it and hear it. And with the haptics, you can't hear it at all. It's very, very quiet, which I do like.

But the the actuation point feels less precise than uh with a traditional mouse switch. I I think my hope is The haptics should be software configurable so you can have like different like like if you think about how a Joy-Con works or um the r trigger rumble on a dual sense joy joystick uh a gamepad works. There's a lot of a variability in how you can present the sound waves that turn into those haptic bumps on those devices.

And my hope is that you'll they'll get to a point where they let you configure what those curves look like. So it's less of a hump and more of a more of a square wave type look. So it's on off, on off, and is very precise and very, very sharp feeling. Um but the but the software's not there for that yet. Um, you can configure, like I said, you can configure the actuation depth, so you can make it so you bottom out the s the the press or you just barely graze um

And and I actually quite like that. I went from I play a lot of uh I've been playing a lot of arc raiders lately and I've been playing a lot of guns that are semi auto guns. And even in like Fortnite where a lot of the guns are full auto, but you're but you're meant to, if you're good at the game, be tappa tapping the shots. It's remarkable how much more accurate I am with the really light touch on the switch.

Uh, to do the triggering. Like you can you can make it so you just barely, barely graze almost like it's a touch surface, which is kind of wild to me.

Um, and it has if you're in Windows and you're running G Hub, you can change the profiles on the fly based on the game you're playing. I generally on mice, especially advocate setting and forgetting your settings so that you're locked in because like you want your brain to inherently know that moving the mouse this much is gonna make you turn this much no matter what game you're playing and it's better to kind of normalize across Uh n normalize like one DPI, one

one set of settings. But yeah. Have you have you used the onboard memory manager with this one? I have. Yeah. It's the same as it's the same as it always is. Yeah, because I'm using it right now in Linux. Yeah, that that's oh, do they make that for Linux? No, I'm using the onboard I'm Oh, the old onboard memory manager. No.

That's what I use instead of G Hub to be clear,'cause that that's just a lighter weight way to manage the mouse profiles and sensitivity and stuff. So they only gave me this is the this w the mouse is just out. as we're recording this now. Oh, okay uh so I'm using pre release software and they only gave me G Hub. I don't know if the onboard memory manager does, but I am using the onboard memory profiles to set up how I want it to work in Linux.

Uh I do still wish that this had a profile button on the bottom so that I didn't have to bind a key on the mouse to changing profiles. Um, the the next thing to do is I got I have I I have like three different kinds of mouse switches here that I want to do some testing with. I have some old KLH reds which are were the kind of default you wanna change your mouse switches switches the last time I went through this process.

I also got these brown um they're I d I can't remember what they're called. They're brown with yellow bumps and they're supposed to be the the standard for quiet switches these days. um relatively hair trigger. And I'm gonna try both of those and some other mouses, mouses that I have and compare them to this uh for upcoming PC World stuff.

Um, but yeah, like it's it's interesting. The whole thing about this is interesting because you know, we talked about the optical mice mouse sensors last year or the year before as being a really impactful piece of technology. because they turned something that was a physical sensor, you know, in the case of mount mice, it was wheels with slots cut into them that they could shine light through that determined that were attached to rollers that rolled when you moved the mouse ball.

And like that was how we moved cursors up until the late nineties. Um then the optical sensor came on and turned that into a silicon based process where we got all the benefits of of camera technology improving and silicon uh getting faster. Um, and that gave us things like mice that are thirty two thousand DPI or something ridiculous, which just to be clear.

Unless you have an insanely high resolution screen, a 32,000 DPI mouse is kind of crazy. But an 8,000 DPI mouse makes a ton of sense. I'm using like 4,000 DPI pretty much all the time on my mouse. to get really smooth movement across my four K displays, right? Yeah. I'm I'm I'm at thirty eight hundred. It's it's nice. Also crucially, you don't have to clean them.

Yeah. Which which kind of ties into the thing with mechanical keyboard switches versus Hall effect or or TMR or whatever. Like remember, remember how often you had to Turn over your ball mouse mouse and take the ball out and clean all the lents out. And clean the ball and get the get the gunk that was stuck on the rollers. You Um but but it it also because moving stuff to software has traditionally been really good for giving you more control over it. Now

The tactile stuff, I'm really curious how this ends up working. Like I don't think this tactile solution that they have in this Logitech mouse is ever going to replace like the feel of a mechanical interaction in a clicky switch or a tactile switch. But

It's also possible that their haptic implementation is just not up to snuff yet, because like I think about the trackpad on current MacBook Pros. It's true. And that is basically good enough to fool your brain into thinking that like like I I still to this day am shocked there's no mechanical actuation going on when I press on that touchpad because it feels indistinguishable from back when they did use mechanical touchpads fifteen plus years ago. It's been it's t uh twelve years.

Since they switched to the to the haptic one as I recall. And yeah, you're you're absolutely right. Like that that is indistinguishable from the old way of doing it. Now, the weird thing about that is they haven't really done it for anything except for mimicking that old old physical behavior, right? So maybe we'll get into this soon, but I I don't know about the previous AirPods, but the the new AirPod Pros also feel basically like I'm pressing a real switch.

But they have they have a little scooped and and dental. Oh yeah, the tubes do that too. Kind of kind of convincingly feel like you're pushing a bump. Yeah. Um

Well yeah, so anyway that's that's kind of it. I'm I'm curious to see what Like I don't think these are gonna replace mechanical switches and everything'cause there's more cost, frankly. Yeah so this is gonna be an upgrade forever, I think probably. Yeah, I guess I guess in in some contexts it makes sense for these to be a premium option, but uh but again with like the default controllers on consoles, it would be a real Bummer if they never adopt this just because of the parts wearing out.

I mean controllers have gotten very expensive. For the like the the the default first party ones to be clear. Like the new Joy Cons are a hundred dollars. It's wild to me. Even before tariffs, the the the Switch two Uh Pro Controller was eighty bucks. Yeah.

And like I feel sense also about um seventy, eighty bucks depending on the building. Like that like that's pretty expensive for something that wears out that aggressively. I I also I mean, especially when they're selling premium controllers and those premium controllers aren't using the the fancy sticks either. I I'm I'm curious about why why that doesn't happen. Yeah. And and on the flip side, the lot of the eight bit do controllers that do use HAL and TMR are cheaper than those. Yeah, well.

Who knows? Um I mean look, it's this is the first time in my life that the third party controllers have consistently been better than the first party controllers. Yeah. Cause like if you think about

I think about going over to a friend's house in the N sixty four Playstation era and I saw that they had a bunch of weird color controllers that they bought at Walmart and I was like, Oh man, this is gonna be a bad time And these days I if I go someplace and I and I see eight bit do controllers I'm stoked. So Yeah.

Um I I'm I'm curious to see w how people continue to use these is I guess the the kind of TLDR. Um and I don't think like this Falcotta keyboard is nice. There's they have a regular non split version as well that also uses the magnetic switches.

I think if I were buying one of these, I would buy one of the ones that's a little bit more user configurable because I wouldn't mind having more access to the firmware, even at the expense of Um, at the expense of like the the keyboard configuration interface being pretty nice on this and using the web thing. Um to to your point earlier, I think we I started to talk about this. You can you you can still you in addition to using the web interface.

On Windows, they have a mouse companion that lets you do things like change the profile based on the application that's running because obviously the web based interface can't do that. It also notifies you if there's uh software update, or you can just configure it using uh their their um their main Asus gamer uh software, but what is it called? Um

Uh God, I'm I'm completely blanking. It's the thing that you use to control the lights on your motherboard too, if you don't use open RGB or something like that. Um Armory crate. Oh, I started to say armory crate. I mean that's that's the thing that pulls like motherboard drivers and stuff. I didn't realize that was also their gamer utility. So that controls uh fan speeds, lights. Uh like if you have a a SUS AIO, it controls that.

If you have um you can do firmware updates and everything. It's it's basically like they're all in one. I I think it's not great software. I don't generally run it on my computers if I can avoid it. Yep. Um, but but that is your option if the web interface goes away, right?

is to get an old version of Armory Crate that still supports your device. And um yeah, I'd love to know what you all think about this stuff. I'm I'm curious like I was curious just to try it because I hadn't used any of these switches before and was Curious to see if, you know, software is better than hardware. Yeah. It's cool to see stuff advance. Yeah. Good technology, not bad technology. Um, that's it for us this week, I guess. Uh as always.

This is a listener funded podcast. We wouldn't be here without you guys, the listeners. So if you would like to support the show and make make sure that we keep doing this. Uh, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, it's patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five dollars a month. You get access to the fabulous TechBot Discord, which is full of beautiful nerds just like you.

Uh, as well as uh the monthly Patreon exclusive episodes where Brad and I talk about ongoing projects and um sometimes we take extra questions if we have a bunch of good questions one month. uh uh small topics that don't fit into a normal episode that are maybe too small to talk about in a normal episode.

I think we initially thought that this might be one of those, this m this mechanical keyboards, uh magnetic keyboards rather. No, there's plenty of meat here. And then yeah, it ended up being really interesting when we kind of dug in a little bit. Uh so Uh you can go again to patreon.com slash checkpod to sign up. It's five bucks. We appreciate each and every person who supports the show.

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