Caerdroia by AKB (Price and GB date announced!)

GB THREAD LIVE






Among the roots of the trees you awaken,
Birds leer rapturously upon your disoriented visage,
The redstart solemnizes your parturition with angelic aria,
You recall the year was at its twilight, yet now birthed anew, blossoming with verdant,
All of your consciousness, connected with the weald like hyphae,
Abstracting your past life beyond all fragile recall,
This caerdroia is sacred, you know that you are home now.
The trees willed it, again.


When finding inspiration for designing new boards, sometimes I look back to vintage keyboards and computers, but other times I find inspiration in things that are much more abstract.

With Caerdroia, I wanted to finally design a TKL that I would be proud to put my name on but with so many of them out there already it was tough to come up with something entirely unique. It felt like everything had been done already and I think the reason why it took me over 3 years to finally start designing a TKL for AKB was because I was a little jaded by this, especially given that the majority of TKLs (to me) seemed to copy elements from their contemporaries, or other designs that have truly stood the test of time. I wanted to try and design my TKL so it was truly unique from every angle, and to do that I had to go down the abstract route for inspiration.

I learned about what a Caerdroia was late one evening while deep down a wiki hole - it is essentially a maze in a forest in Wales formed in a labyrinthine shape. While it has no truly historic significance, it has been adopted by various spiritual groups in the area and is hailed as a place of mystical enlightenment. I started with this idea and over time it blossomed into more of a fictional narrative about a sentient forest that would "adopt" unfortunate souls who happened to wander within it, and they would dutifully remain forever - bending to the forest's will. We take inspiration wherever we can find it right?

In March 2024 I worked with CannonKeys to do an in-stock sale of this board, limited to just 50 units. That was fixed to WKL only, and only came in one exclusive colourway. Now I'd like to expand the options, make subtle improvements and offer it to the wider community.


Links:

AKB Website
AKB Discord
See Caerdroia at CannonKeys


Key specs:





Additional specs:

• Top-mounted 4.5mm MX plate (only)
• EC kits and Alps kits to be available as add-ons
• The revised USB hub has 2x USB Type-A ports with USB 3.0 support (supports USB 2.0 fallback if the connected device doesn't support 3.0 spec)
• Manufactured by Hongtu

Confirmed colorways:

As soon as I posted the update with a colour poll, I realised I probably shouldn't have done that. My goal with this keyboard was to provide a curated
experience rather than throw every option at the wall to try and satisfy absolutely everyone, so that is what I have done with the colourways too.


Dolch
Previously with the in-stock round, I chose to run the board exclusively in the Dolch colourway as that was how I had always imagined it throughout
the design process; I personally can't really see this board any other way. I did also say previously that Dolch would be exclusive to the in-stock round,
but those boards didn't quite come out as intended - they were still very nice, but they weren't Dolch. Given that this board will be physically
colour-matched to an OGR (as was is0GR and Petrichor) it should come out as intended as a close approximation to the original.

Given that the OGR, is0GR and Petrichor have all had Dolch colourways now, it only feels natural to continue this trend and adopt this as kind of an
unofficial trademark of AKB moving forward with most projects.





E-Beige
Given that the most recent prototype was shown in this colourway, it just made sense to keep this as part of the lineup. Looks tasty too.





Verdant
When looking at the results of the colour poll from the IC form, all of the colours had virtually the same number of votes. This is my favourite colourway
after Dolch and it also ties in thematically with the story of this board that I want to tell. There is a small tweak now though - now the bottom case
shares the same warm, earth-toned grey with Dolch, as I think it is a much more complementary colour than the cold dark grey that was used before.

Earth tones all the way baby





Alta Rubedo
As with Verdant, I've altered the colourway slightly to use the Dolch bottom colour, fit the vision more closely and share an overall warmer tone. There is an
additional plus to this, as cutting down the number of unique colours used across the lineup has allowed me to keep the costs down to within expected margins,
as selling this board for $450+ was never considered as an option.






V1 Prototype Photos:






V2 Prototype Photos:
Note: The first top case part was missing an engraving so when a replacement was shipped out it had a slightly different shade, hence the slight two-tone look.





Additional renders:






Changes from the in-stock version:

• Added EC support, based on Cipulot's EC TKL X PCB
• Adjusted case screw position on the front to allow room for EC stabiliser wire
• Adjusted internal AKB logo engraving
• Expanded thicc plate compatibility
• Adjusted the geometry around right shift on the thicc plate as some stabs didn't fully clear
• Added force break gasket at the front-middle of the board due to screw position adjustment for EC
• Adjusted alignment post design
• Adjusted weight geometry (internal) for ease of production
• Fix Alps plate to now support full right shift

Some context regarding the change to USB 3.0.

Some minor adjustments have had to be made to the bottom case to house the shiny new 3.0 hub, and due to the many additional components
required the decision has been made to connect the two daughterboards together into one, to make use of the extra PCB real estate. The only
external change made to the board is the USB-C port has been lowered by 1mm.





Compatibility:

Default (thick) plate support,
Solder MX PCB,
Alps PCB:


Hotswap MX PCB


Alps Plate (MX stabs by default)
Plate files with OG stabilizer compatibility will be open sourced


EC PCB support (Prepare yourself...also keep in mind not all of these will be compatible with the plate in the kit.




GB plans/details:

• GB will be launching on Friday, 11th April 2025.
• Price will be starting from $420
• Regional vendors to be announced over the next couple of weeks, but this project will be managed by myself through CannonKeys