On Saturday, October 17, we got to attend a special event: Mechanicon, in Frankfurt. It's Europe's largest meetup for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. I flew in from Canada, and Jo, our lead designer, and Justin, our cameraman, flew in all the way from South Africa. It was so worth it.
The event is free to attend, that's one of their key pillars. The idea is to make the community and the hobby accessible to as many people as possible. There were 650 attendees this year, which is the largest Mechanicon ever. People brought along their keyboards and put them up on long tables for others to check out.
There were hundreds of keyboards to see (probably over a thousand, actually), from entirely DIY boards to carefully preserved historical keyboards from the 1970s. Naturally, some of my favorites were the heavily modded ZSA boards. Here's Dietrich's Moonlander, with a unique printed wrist rest he designed himself and released on Thingiverse.
Here's another Moonlander that caught my eye. This one features a custom rig for maintaining the distance and angle of both parts, as well as a self-built Trackpoint pointing device with mouse buttons on the left thumb cluster.
There was also this Voyager with wooden wrist rests:
We set up a typing contest in our booth, powered by typ.ing. You could use your own keyboard, one of ours, or type directly on the laptop. Our booth was packed:
The competition was intense — Mechanicon visitors can type! Here's the final leaderboard:
We got to have a short ceremony on the main stage at the end of the event, where we awarded Bev a trophy. We also had some prizes for her, as well as for Caleb and Anton.
I also gave a short talk, It's Not Business, It's Personal. You can watch that below:
Mechanicon is a non-profit, entirely organized by volunteers. It was such a pleasure working with Christian and his team. They made us feel so welcome and helped us with all the crazy setup before the event. Christian actually ran home to get us a set of hex wrenches for putting the TV stand together. At the end of the day we all got to have dinner together.
Many thanks to all the people who attended the event and came by to say hi or compete in the typing contest, to those who came to watch my talk, and to the Mechanicon team for putting this whole thing together! This was one for the books.
