Wave Key Mechanical Keyboard

Details

An 84 key layout that keeps the arrow cluster and the function row, in a 6063-T5 anodised aluminium case, gasket mounted on 60 Shore A poron. Switches are hot-swappable, so a failed switch is a Rs 25 part and a thirty second job. This category cheats in four specific places. Hot-swap is advertised on boards fitted with three-pin sockets, which take only a subset of switches and shear the plate pins off the rest. The 80 million press rating printed on the box belongs to the switch maker and describes the switch, not the socket it sits in or the board under it. Doubleshot PBT is claimed for caps that are ABS with a PBT-look coating, which you find out when the coating goes shiny in year two. And the battery is quoted in mAh with no voltage, which is not a capacity at all, only half of one. The part that actually kills keyboards is the USB-C port, and on almost every board it is soldered to the main PCB, so a bent connector is a new keyboard. Here it is a separate daughterboard on a ribbon.

• Five-pin hot-swap sockets rated for 15,000 insertions, taking three-pin and five-pin switches without modification. The socket is what we warrant; the 80 million press figure is the switch maker's and is printed as theirs
• Doubleshot PBT keycaps, 1.5 mm walls, legends moulded as a second shot of plastic, visible from the underside of the cap. Not printed, not coated, so they cannot wear off
• USB-C daughterboard on a ribbon connector, Rs 390, the single most common failure on any keyboard
• 4,000 mAh at 3.7 V nominal, which is 14.8 Wh. Both numbers, because one of them alone means nothing
• About six weeks of use with the backlight off, at an average draw of about 4 mA over roughly 1,000 hours. About 40 hours with the backlight at half. Charges 0 to 100 in about 4 hours at 5 V and 1 A
• Remapping happens on the keyboard itself over an open configuration standard. No app to install, no account, no background service running on your computer, and nothing that stops working when a vendor shuts a server down
• Eight Phillips screws, no glue, no clips to break, and the service manual is free to download
• The honest trade is that this is 780 g of aluminium and it is loud. A gasket mount softens the impact, it does not make a mechanical keyboard quiet, and if you share a room the Silent variant is the one to pick
• There is no Shuunnya service-centre network. A warranty claim means sending the board to us, with no turnaround time promised