End of Support for XMIT Hall Effect Mechanical Keyboards

[XMIT]

Hi folks. <tap tap> is this thing on?

I'm here to announce the formal end of support for the XMIT Hall Effect Mechanical Keyboard. Manufactured from about 2016 through 2018 by Ace Pad Tech in Guangzhou, China, these boards sold through Massdrop (now drop.com) with a few early samples going out over the forums.

What does end of support mean? It means I'm out of spare parts. Requests for these will, sadly, be declined. Firmwares and updaters and other assets may go offline at any time.

I do not have any schematics, drawings, etc. that would be useful at this point. The molds for these switches were milled out of aluminum, reached the end of their life, and disappeared when Ace shut down. My primary contact at Ace responded to a text message about 4-5 years ago, that's the last I heard from her.

There was one extremely clever hardware engineer from Valve who managed to do what I never did: spend enough time staring at the boards to reverse engineer just enough to repair them.

I was optimistic that the Keystone keyboard would be the spiritual successor to my boards. I gave the input.club folks a substantial amount of IP back in about 2017-2018. I was optimistic that I would see it in 2020. Then in 2021, and 2022, and 2023. I've now given up.

Maybe one day there will be a true successor. But it would be a ground up project, built from scratch, with no relation to the original.

Back to lurking. Thanks friends for the great ride.

[headphone_jack]

o7.

[mcmaxmcmc]

o7 -- Thank you for your service and inspiration!