NEO Palette G88 - Gasket Stacked Acrylic TKL Kit|Build Guide Anime Updated

Palette G88 is the second model of Palette series following Palette G67, the first gasket mount stacked acrylic keyboard kit.

Palette G88 inherited the simple yet effective gasket mount structure and is further improved on material application and engineering precision.
Palette G67 was a budget friendly, high performance, fun to build keyboard kit. But it was far from perfect. With the great feedback and advice for improvement from NEO Keys customers and Discord community,

- Acrylic material and design upgrade:
Palette G67 featured fully customizable acrylic colors. An unexpected downside is the inconsistency of acrylic plate thickness.
Thickness of different color varies from 2.2mm – 2.8mm. With a certain color combination, the case body could get too thin to allow any plate flex.
Between the dilemma of typing experience, performance, engineering precision and aesthetics diversity, Palette G88 went for the former.
Palette G88 uses a hybrid of 3 different types of acrylic material, 2.7mm frosted clear cast acrylic, 2.5mm clear extruded acrylic and 3.5mm clear extrude acrylic.
The result is 3.25mm PCB to case bottom clearance (vs maximum of 2.35mm clearance on G67), allowing a lot more plate flex; more consistent external dimension and internal structure; more consistent gasket compression ratio which also delivers better performance and typing sound.
Because 2.5mm and 3.5mm extruded acrylic plate is available in only clear, plate color customization and color tab design is no longer available for Palette G88.

- PCB and general case structure upgrade:
All stacked acrylic keyboards share the same inevitable design flaw, the cut-outs on lowest 3 layers for integrated USB-C port.

To resolve the issue, Palette G88 PCB does not have an integrated USB-C port, instead uses C3 Unified USB-C Daughter Board.
The cable that connects PCB and daughter board runs through the bottom layer, which is covered and protected by an acrylic housing.
Palette G88 thus has a fully closed case body. It is visually integral, structurally more rigid, robust and durable.


- Feet design upgrade:
Palette G67 uses stacked acrylic plate feet design. It has an angled contact surface with desktop, thus grip and stability could become an issue for those who don’t use a desk mat.

Palette G88 features a new locking mechanism that binds stack acrylic plates vertically, thus creating a perfectly flat and level contact, providing a much stronger grip against your desk, and no doubt looks much cooler.


- Plate material and finish upgrade:
Due to the large size of TKL keyboard layout and the natural lack of stiffness in acrylic case, softer plates material didn’t test as well as stiffer plates during prototyping stage. Brass plate came out as the final winner.
With some properly designed flex cuts, it provides a great balance between soft typing experience and crispy and clear acoustics.
To compensate the lack of case color options, the brass plate comes in 4 polished PVD finishes, gold, gun metal grey and rarely seen blue and purple!

- Hardware upgrade:
Brass standoff used on Palette G67 has some rust issues and its gold color will not universally work well with some darker plate color options such as gun metal grey and blue. Palette G88 will use all custom made anodized aluminum M2 standoff.