The Norbauer Project: Building a Custom Keyboard for the Next-Generation Tonkless Models of the Topre Experiment

Norbauer has been building credibility in the keyboard community over the past 10 years and has a loyal fan base. He can make a keyboard with a cost of $3,600 and be sure that he can make sense of it.

An off-the-shelf part was used to make a prototype, but he scrapped it. There are already dozens of companies making custom keyboards.

“I think about my long-term vision for what we’re doing as being kind of like Leica, the camera company. They do crazy things that just wouldn’t exist otherwise, like their monochrome camera. I think it’s a very interesting thing. It has a small audience for it. And so in order to make it in any reasonable way, you have to charge a ton for it, because how many people on Earth are going to buy it? I am happy that there is that in the world.

He doesn’t want to sell a lot of keyboards. No, not selling a lot of keyboards is part of the plan. He sold 50 of them last summer, sight unseen, in a private preorder for a group of previous clients — paying beta testers, essentially. Right now he’s selling another 150 or so “First Edition” keyboards, to be delivered in late summer. Then he’ll probably do another batch. And another one after that. He is not going to sell a million.

He designed a housing and learned enough machining to make a prototype on a WWII-era milling machine. Once he was satisfied with the design, he found a manufacturer and launched a small group buy on a keyboard forum and asked if any other Topre diehards wanted one, to cover the costs of making one for himself.

He hired an electrical engineering firm to create the PCB and thought it would be the most difficult part, since Topre switch clones are easy to come by. That took about a year to complete. “And then I realized, ‘Shit, I guess I have to make all the other stuff that goes with it.’ It took about five years.

The project turned into a deliberate exercise in making the best keyboard he possibly can, regardless of cost, somewhere along the line. I was in a situation where my ambitions spiraled out of control.

He thought he could do better. His first prototypes sounded great, but they were just as wobbly as Topre. The second design felt worse than the first because it had tighter tolerances. He added more material to get a deeper sound. Each revision required a new round of injection-molded tooling and he searched for the best combination of feel and sound.

The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously found in the Happy Hacking Keyboard), but they’re smoother and less wobbly, with a deeper sound. Unlike every other Topre-style switch, they’re designed around MX-style keycaps from the start, so the housings don’t interfere with Cherry-profile keycaps. The situation is more significant than it may seem; the Seneca works with thousands of aftermarket keycap sets, instead of the bare handful that work with Topre boards.

How to Build a Better Compliant-Beam MX Stabilizer: The Norbauer-Seneca Keyboard Creator

“The original plan was to use hand-lubed MX stabilizers because it’s such a standard thing, right? It would be interesting to see if there was a way to get rid of the sound without relying on lubrication.

He said that developing the stabilizers took several years, had a lot of false starts, and was a personal cash bazooka. His first attempt, mostly on his own, ended in a solution better than anything on the market without lube. There is 90 percent of the place not there. He started over.

He worked with a firm that specializes in kinematics to develop a totally new stabilizer mechanism. They created two new stabilizer mechanisms. He has a compliant-beam design which is better than the existing stabilizers and his first prototype. It’s much less prone to rattle or tick. It is as close to perfect as you can get, without revising the way stabilizers work. The second design is a complicated series of pin-joint hinges with five times as many parts as a standard stabilizer. It’s hideously expensive to produce and both time consuming and fiddly to assemble, but it’s better.

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

The Norbauer & Co. Seneca: a luxury PCB with an acoustic isolation switch, and lemo isolation cable

Norbauer says that solutions to technical problems are more interesting than trying to minimize production costs. It has been taken to a very extreme point on the eca. “Our goal is just to make this good, and that’s all that matters. I was like, “Let’s go with the best way to do it”, whenever there was a branch. The philosophy of this board has been that.

The case was made from solid aluminum, with a MAO finish, but he had to set up a company in China to get it. There are two options, either a warm gray called travertine or a lighter gray called oxide, which looks a bit like concrete. They’re both smooth to the touch. A nearly $8,000 titanium option is also available, which I haven’t seen in person.

The switchplate is milled from solid brass, for the acoustic properties, and then chrome-plated for aesthetics. Brass absorbs sound better than aluminum and it would have been cheaper, lighter and easier to mill. The galvanic isolation chip in the PCB is intended to prevent a rogue power supply from overloading the computer and causing a fire on the keyboard. The cable has a lemo connection on the keyboard side. Lemo connectors are more secure than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and cool is better, and it’s his keyboard.

The Seneca is the first luxury keyboard from Norbauer & Co, a company that would like to be for keyboards what Leica is to cameras, Porsche is to cars, or Hermés is to handbags and scarves.

Each Seneca is assembled by hand in Norbauer’s garage in Los Angeles, at a rate of one or two per day, by either Norbauer or Taeha Kim — aka Taeha Types, keyboard influencer and bespoke keyboard builder turned Norbauer & Co. employee/investor.

He takes an hour or two per keyboard to make the stabilizers, and then he takes a small reamer to make the pin holes large enough for the pins to fit in.

It took a long time to develop the stabilizers. They’re hideously complicated and overengineered, finicky to put together, and they’re without a doubt the best stabilizers in the world. There’s no rattle or tick in any of the stabilized keys, and although the spacebar has a deeper thunk than the rest of the keys, it’s not much louder to my ears.

It is possible for a small group of people to afford the Seneca because of its beauty and usefulness. That’s as good a reason as any. But mostly, this is a luxury keyboard for a very specific type of keyboard nerd. If your idea of nice is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is better than anything else you can buy or build.

Norbauer Sells the Seneca, a Legendary Heavy Grail Computer Product, and Its Executives Lose All Favors

I would not have been able to recover my R&D costs when I sold the first and second batches. It is an interesting question. So, I’m bad at business.”

He says his business was not profitable for most of the time he was making housings. My goal has always been to break even, and also do really cool R&D. I don’t personally lose a lot of money. The Heavy Grail was very popular. I thought it would sell a little more than it did. 100 percent of the revenue went into the Seneca, that helped bootstrap it and fund it.

Last year, when the Seneca was mostly developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical tasks, he sold just under half the company to the investment firm Tiny, run by an old acquaintance. The arrangement leaves Norbauer with a majority stake in the company and total creative control, which makes him more focused on developing keyboards and less on making money.

The other person in this situation is the executive of Norbauer & Co. In a 12,000-word post about the sale, Norbauer said, “He acts essentially as our COO, but his job description is basically doing all the things that I hate.”

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

From a website to a business: Norbauer stumbled across Topre keyboards for the FC 660C and FC980C

He also wanted more control over the other aspects of the board, and he wanted something to offer people who like the Norbauer aesthetic but aren’t up for buying a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the warranty, and transplanting the guts into a new case.

Each was a chance to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing capability, and to experiment with different materials (steel, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (polishing, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

The Heavy-9 and Heavy 6 were used for the FC 660C and FC980C, respectively. In 2020 there was a new Housing for the HappyHacker that was called the Heavy Grail.

Topre keyboards are rare compared to mechanical keyboards using Cherry MX-style switches. Only a few companies ever made them, so there aren’t many layout options, and they tend to be more expensive, with fewer features for the money. They’re also harder to customize, with only a few different dome options; they also aren’t compatible with most aftermarket keycaps out of the box. And while metal cases are common in enthusiast mechanical keyboards, Topre keyboards only come in plastic. But Topre boards have a dedicated fan base because the domes give Topre switches a snappy tactility you can’t otherwise replicate.

Two more companies were formed as a result of the dating website. The time and money that came from selling the three startup gave him the chance to learn how to make Star Trek prop replicas. It also led him to Topre keyboards.

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this got him a website, a startup, and tendonitis. The tendonitis was fixed by adopting proper typing form which involves swinging your hands straight over the keyboard. Searching for a more comfortable keyboard eventually sent him down the path of an obsession.

Norbauer has a habit of wanting things that don’t exist, then figuring out how to build them from scratch. About 20 years ago, he got an idea for a dating website. “I didn’t have any money at all. I dropped out of a PhD program and I just had this idea for a company I wanted to start and I couldn’t hire anyone to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess I just have to learn how to code.’”

Norbauer grew up in West Virginia in the 1990s, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and absorbing both its retro-modern aesthetic and its vision of an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was also the beginning of the personal computing era and the dawn of the internet. The future of Star Trek would likely be better if the world were more connected because of the computer that represented an escape from the world as it is.

How much do you wanna type on the Seneca? Why would you want to type on your keyboard? Which would you rather have?

Over the past month or so, I’ve asked a few friends and family members to try typing on the Seneca. Most of them have desk jobs and use mechanical keyboards, but they are not keyboard nerds.

The term “endgame,” among keyboard enthusiasts, is sort of a running gag. When you dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keys you can stopodling around with parts and get on with the job at hand. You start over after a few months when you see something shiny.

But what if you didn’t have to compromise? What if you had the time, the patience, the creative vision, and the cash to create your endgame keyboard from scratch? From the cable all the way down to the stabilizers.

You have narrowed your audience to two small groups if you sell a keyboard for $3,600. You have to be able to convince the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s something about your keyboard they can’t get anywhere else. In order to convince the keyboard nerds and nouveau riche coders that this keyboard is worth half an entry level Rolex, you need to convince them.

As a rule, moderately impressed, they have been. Everyone likes it but not everyone is impressed with the way it sounds and looks. It hasn’t ruined them for their Keychrons. Most of them ask where the number pad is.

Nordbauer Seneca Review: A $3,600 luxury capactive keyboard for the keyboard obsessed (by C.A. Norbauer)

The typing angle on the Seneca is flat. Most mechanical keyboards have a typing angle in the back between 3 and 11 degrees. Flat is better in ergonomics. The optional riser is made in South Africa from native hardwoods and it has a three-degree typing angle. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a negative three-degree angle, and now all my other keyboards feel weird. This could be the most consequential impact on my life going forward.

There are a few quirks. The cable has a Lemo connecter at the near end and a computer port on the computer end. It looks very cool, but it means you have to change the cables often if the Seneca is joining other keyboards on your desk. On the one hand, if you’re buying a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard, are you really going to move it off your desk that much? If you care about keyboards enough to buy this one, you’ll probably have a lot of nice keyboards. The short Lemo-to-USB-C dongleNorbauer is working on wasn’t ready in the review period.

The Edition Zero Senecas, including my review unit, came with closed-source firmware that doesn’t allow for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the biggest omission. Norbauer did not include remappability in the firmware for the sake of simplicity when he commissioned it a decade ago. He felt that software remapping was good enough for a keyboard that isn’t meant to be carried from computer to computer.

Edition zero is the first production run of which 50 were offered in a private sale last summer to a group of previous Norbauer clients, as well as a few more for testing and review.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

Nordbauer Seneca Review: A $3,600 luxury capactive keyboard for the keyboard obsessed (article by Jan Bergman et al. 05/04/2015)

It is staggeringly heavy, ungodly expensive, and unbelievably pleasant to type on, in a way that maybe only diehard keyboard enthusiasts will fully appreciate.

The Seneca is permanent because of the lack of a better word. It looks like a smooth concrete or worn down stone is it’s weight. The case is made of aluminum, and has a warm gray texture but feels very smooth. It is hard to pick up and there is no place to put your fingers under it. It is supposed to stay at your desk.

The typing experience is sublime. The keys have a smooth downstroke, and there’s a big hump at the top. The ones on my unit are medium weight and feel like 45g Topre, but they have lighter and heavier options.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

A Damping Raindrop: A Soft Raindrop in the Seneca’s Power-Suppressed Dilaton Microscopic Keyboard

There are gaskets between the switches and the solid brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping material everywhere. The result is a deep, muted thock, without a hint of ping.

The gentle sound of the Seneca is often likened to raindrops, according to the keyboard info page. It has a soft intentionally vintage-sounding thock. Read that in whatever voice you’d like. Jake said that the typing test sounded like rain and that he didn’t read the info page.