Someone Made a Massive Mechanical Keyboard with 450 Individual Key Switches

Like most people in the western world today, your work life probably revolves around your computer. It is simply prudent to make sure your computer is optimized for maximum productivity. If you are, say, a video editor, then it is worth the money to upgrade your computer to render videos as quickly as possible. No matter what your profession, you can almost certainly benefit from a good mechanical keyboard, which should improve your typing performance and also help to mitigate the repetitive stress injuries that plague computer users. But we have to say that Omnisai probably went a bit overboard when he built this 450-key keyboard.

A typical 100% size keyboard has 104 keys by US ANSI standards, though they have 105 keys by European ISO standards and 108 keys by Japanese JIS standards. This is what most people consider a normal keyboard, with a function row on top, arrow keys to the right, and a 10-key numerical set of keys on the far right. Smaller keyboards are quite common among people who don’t need all of those keys or who are trying to save space. Laptops, for instance, often omit the 10-key keypad. Occasionally, we see larger than 100% keyboards. These are usually built by people who have a specialized task in mind, such as gaming or photo editing.

Omnisai’s keyboard takes that idea about four times too far. His keyboard is 433% of the size of a normal keyboard. Why did he build it? Simply to one-up a Reddit user named buttonpushertv, who built a huge 165% keyboard. There is, realistically speaking, no practical use for a 450-key keyboard. But that doesn’t make it any less impressive. All 450 keys have Gateron Yellow key switches and are topped with a variety of key caps. Many of those key caps are blank, because they don’t have intended purpose. The key switches are soldered onto ScrabblePad PCBs, which have an ortholinear pattern. A pair of Teensy++ 2.0 boards are used to monitor the resulting keyboard matrix. Omnisai still needs to 3D print the keyboard feet and finish the QMK (Quantum Mechanical Keyboard) firmware, but this massive keyboard is already partially functional. It does, however, seem nearly unusable to us.