Unigo66

This keyboard is an absolute nightmare.

Please excuse some of the photos here. I didn't have the correct hex head available.

I didn't cover this part in the video, but the problems started long before the keyboards even shipped. I remember joining this at around the same time as Scott Wei's G60 through the ALF Discord. Probably coincidence, but both of these ended up being prolonged group buys. This one had what I now consider as a telltale sign of a shaky buy, the close-then-reopen. I'm hazy on the timeline, but some time after the buy closed, they reopened it for new participants. I got in on this at that later time.

Browsing the Discord, I found discontent participants from the original time frame getting frustrated at the lack of updates. For a lot of these people, their Paypal protection was running out or has run out, and they were left at the whim of the runner for any kind of progress. Seeing this got me jumpy, and I complained vocally as my own protection window was approaching its end. Seems like the squeaky wheel got the grease, because I got mine before a lot of others who joined much earlier. I'm not really sure if everyone got theirs at this point.

Upon receipt, I had high hopes. The packaging was one of the best I've seen yet, including a 3D printed stand, custom cut foam and a whole heap of accessories. but this would not last. Assembly was easy enough, and first impressions were more or less what I predicted. The familiar integrated plate feel and sound was something I was willing to trade for the ergonomics and the aesthetics of an entirely wireless split ergo keyboard. Connection problems struck immediately.

I had placed the dongle of dongles into my monitor's built-in USB hub not a foot from the actual keyboards, and I experienced stuttering, mixing up left/right order, and multi-second latency. Prior discussion on Discord recommended that I plug the dongle of dongles into a USB extension cable and place it on the desk less than a foot from the keyboards. This is obviously ridiculous as this essentially made them wired, but I shrugged it off and moved along. Some others in the chat were talking of fast battery drain and overheating on the dongledongle, but I didn't really see those on mine.

Next problem struck when I took it to work. I figured ergo would outweigh the feel and sound there. I noticed pretty quickly while coding that the key I had mapped to `/` was broken. At this point, I deemed it too unreliable for work, and took it back home. I assumed it was a bent pin on the switch, but didn't want to deal with it at the time, so I put it into storage.

I revisited it years down the line to find that the switch pins were fine. The hotswap socket seemed fine, and reflowing the joints didn't seem to fix it. Searching the Discord, someone suggested an eeprom reset, which cut connection to one of the sides and caused the other side to only output junk. I wasn't able to fix or diagnose it any further from here, and I didn't really want to. Even when working as intended, it's a terrible experience, so it didn't seem really worth it invest any more time or effort. I called it quits, made the video, then hauled it back to the parental residences where it'll forever rest. I initially had hopes of retrofitting a wired PCB, but I just ended up buying a Lulu instead (which has it's own host of problems). Realistically, it's too nice of an object to just throw out, so it'll probably sit here until maybe the next generation finds it and uses it as an ashtray.