Optical Keyboard.. where is it now on the market?

[modology]

I've heard that Taiwanese company has been making optical switches and BLOODY is making their own optical keyboard products as well. So far there are nothing to available on the market. Anyone know more about this?

[Findecanor]

The two companies were Adomax and Bloody/A4Tech. AFAIK, both are from Taiwan.
Both companies switches were announced at Computex in Taiwan earlier this summer.
I posted a thread on Geekhack about them back then.

Adomax's "Flaretech"
The switch is solid state, all components surface-mounted on the underlying PCB with switch modules that can be clipped on and off. Stem and backlight are Cherry MX-compatible but the switch tops are opaque with a transparent light guide so there is no light bleed. The stems are also transparent. They had only linear switches at Computex but they showed switch housings in different colours so I suppose that they are going to make switches that feel like Cherry MX red, blue and brown.
The most interesting thing, I think is that the switches support analogue sensing.
From what I have gathered, they did not have any keyboard manufacturer ready at Computex. All keyboards were their own prototypes. Adomax is a brand for peripherals in Taiwan otherwise, so I think it is likely that they will also make their own keyboards.

* Official video
* 【Computex 2015】轴革命 ADOMAX光轴Flaretech Switch亮相
* Post on Overclock.net, and Youtube video by the same guy.
* Computex 2015: Adomax Flaretech Infrared Keyswitches Could Be Keyboard’s Next Big Thing

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any newer info than anything above.
Apparently these above are the top hits on Google, and the rest are referring or copying them.

Bloody/A4Tech Light Strike:
The Light Strike switches are also Cherry MX-compatible and backlit but with light-bleed, so they are not the same. They have not mentioned analogue sensing but instead how fast they are - comparing them to a Cherry MX-board 6.0 at the fair.

* Youtube: Bloody The World's Fastest Mechanical Keyboard (Product video)
* Youtube: Bloody (New Optical Keyboard Switch), NeuroSky, Arky, & Pandora Mobility - Computex. Tek Syndicate channel.

[Muirium]

An announcement at a trade show can often go nowhere. Even two, in this case.

The "solid state" analog modular switches sounded promising, and still do. You know, if they find a product and ship someday. We could have some fun with those. Like swapping the upper mechanism with a classical IBM switch. There's also the scope for midi (piano) keyboards if it really is a well behaved analog system.

But first the vapour must condense into something real.

[XMIT]

modology: Please put your country of residence in your profile.

There is a fellow on Geekhack in the US who is selling some of these Bloody keyboards. You can see if he'll send you one.

[Findecanor]

Bloody has a few keyboards on their web site, but not the one that the GH user is selling nor the one seen in the videos above.
Most of the keyboards on the site seem to have the Light Strike switches only on WASD or on QWERASDF ...

[Redmaus]

Wow this looks quite interesting.

Would be perfect to market to gamers.

[modology]

Bloody has a few keyboards on their web site, but not the one that the GH user is selling nor the one seen in the videos above.
Most of the keyboards on the site seem to have the Light Strike switches only on WASD or on QWERASDF ...

Interesting, these optical switches must be quite expensive to produce. Not to bash BLOODY keyboard, but their design is so fugly..... but yeah... I never understand why gamers and kids nowadays are into ugly gaming keyboard with Neon and LED all over the places.

[Proto]

Hi all. New member here. Optical keyboards should be fairly easy, and cheap with commodity LEDs and plastic fiber light pipes.

There were lots of interesting patents filed back in the 1970s and 80s laying out different implementations. These are all expired and public domain at this point (there are some newer patents too, but there are so many expired ones that realistically no one should be obstructed by patent issues at this point.)

I really like this old patent http://www.google.com/patents/US4442425 for a passive optical keyboard –- it's got no electronics on the board. The light is piped in from the PC tower or all-in-one or whatever over fiber optics (this could be the cheap plastic stuff you see on fiber optic light balls and Christmas trees.) Then the light is passed back to the computer for decoding. Have couplers on each row, or column, or both. Each key has a shutter or aperture or reflector (there are so many ways to implement it) that uniquely interacts with the light beam (unique to a given row or column). You could also implement a timing-based decoding system, based on different-length light paths.

A lot of the latency advantage is destroyed by combining optical with a conventional legacy interface like USB, which is what Bloody and that other company are doing. They claim a 0.2 ms latency but that's meaningless and unrealizable because they're then converting it to an electrical signal and USB and going through the conventional stack. To get low and guaranteed latencies, we need a new, dedicated keyboard interface and protocol. A keyboard is such a central device that I'm surprised the industry has not bothered to design a tailored, optimized interface and protocol just for keyboards. USB was always overkill, PS/2 is clunky and insecure (lots more EM leakage than USB). If we can't do optical, something like Apple's Lightning, but cheap and with only four or so pins, and an event-driven, non-polled interface, would be ideal.

[terrycherry]

If someone is interesting, I can sell to you.

[Findecanor]

I don't think that anyone needs faster latency than 1ms (Full-speed USB), even in the fastest games. Yet at the same time, people seem to be content with using game controllers that use Bluetooth -- which has even higher latency.

PS/2 has been touted as being super-fast compared to USB and yes, it is faster than Low-Speed USB, but compared to Full-Speed USB it is not necessarily. The PS/2 bus runs as between 10 and 16.7 kHz, with the shortest key event being 11 bits - and that gives a latency between 1.1 ms and 0.66 ms depending on the bus speed.
Then there are many events that need twice or three times as many bits and a PS/2 keyboard has to deliver each event after the other while a USB keyboard can reports on the state of all keys in every packet - one per ms. In reality though, the USB HID stack at the host has a limit to how many events it can interpret per report and that number has been measured to be 36 in Windows but only 8 on Apple devices.