Hello, Déck guys.

I was looking into getting a deck legend keyboard, but am disappointed by your lack of interest in responding to customer requests for additional molded product. The realities of economies of scale are understandable, but by not supporting non-US keymaps, you're starkly limiting your potential audience.

I do have a few suggestions, however, that do not involve new molds:
1) Selling a kit of N blank keycaps -- rather then 15 logoish keys, and a single blank.
2) If there is support in the controller for reporting the Fn key, changing the LED status, etc, from the computer with either the USB or PS2 interface, by all means, document it! You don't need to write software; your users will no doubt do that for you in short order if you simply document it.

And a few suggestions I haven't seen that'd have to wait for the existing stock to sell out:
3) Support a switch between USB and PS/2 mode, rather then requiring users to clip a resistor on the board. This should be a fairly simple modification to the keyboard. Obviously, it'd wait until the existing units sell...
4) Come out with a version with the extra key for euopean layouts. There should be another "square" key to the left of the Z; the shift key is shorter for this. It's probably possible to use the same PCB regardless -- just install either a longer shift or shorter shift and the extra key. (OTOH, you guys /are/ professionals, presumably you already knew that.)

I can answer some of these, not from the deck viewpoint but from the viewpoint of someone trained in Electronics Engineering.

If they were to add another switch to the keyboard it would require a new PCB, updates to the µC, retooling for the new shift key (unless another key would be the EXACTLY the same size which is then a matter of creating a new printing for shift to on the blank key), and the worse thing yet, they will have to have the board retested for standards compliance.
(FCC / all the other standards required in order to be allowed to sell the keyboard).
This will cost quite a bit of money in order to make such a slight change, so it would not be reasonable financially to do this slight change just to “maybe” increase sales over seas.

As I said I'm not associated with Deck in anyway/shape/form other than owning a legend, so they would have to answer this because it really isn't my place but I was just trying to give a since of the amount of work required to redo/change the keyboard in this manner.

As for the keycaps, I don't think they are making enough money on them inorder to produce more. I would say it cost a bit to make a certin keycap even of the same size as another key just when printing the info on the key.

Guttenaff,

Are you sure your not working here in our building somewhere???? You are right on with your eval. We do take note of ideas and weigh them on how feasable they are.

thanks
Deck Mgr.

I just noticed a vital mistake which made a sentence look sort of bad (left out the "not" ) Hopefully people understood what I meant out of context, from the rest of the post. I sure hope I didn't confuse anyone!

deckAdmin, nope nowhere close to there. I'm slightly south and east of ya, in Ohio where the weater changes every 5mins. It has been going from 65°F to 20°F every other day or so it seems...

I do have some degrees in Electronics & Computer Engineering Tech w/Telecom and general manufacturing studies that go along with it. I’m currently working on my duel B.S in Computer Engineering Tech & Electronics Engineering Tech.

For anyone looking for blank keycaps in the future you can buy them through the following thread:

http://www.deckkeyboards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=313

Will post them on the main site in the future.

EDIT: These are now available through the main site by clicking here.