Helix Lab AARU 65 In Depth Keyboard Review

hello morning Simon enjoyers and hieroglyph enjoyers I am coming to you with a it's it's most definitely a keyboard this is the helix aru 65. which is a six degree angle 65 with about a 20.5 millimeter front height it's very reminiscent of the rotkl uh hopefully you remember that if not I have a review on it uh so if you enjoy hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone you will definitely enjoy this one it's got a potentiometer slider in the place of the 65 expansion keys and you can also have a blocker there in case you like wasting space even more uh this version here is uh well this version here is the Divine Edition which means that the raised hieroglyphs are anodized in a different color than the base color which is quite cool uh this version here has an Aloo plate and is hot swap hence the Normie bottom row but solder variants are also available and now it comes in a lot of cool colors uh the coolest colors being the uh Divine Editions uh so those are the ones with you know the the golden Engravings uh but the rest of them are pretty cool the base model comes in at about 430 which is not bad and the Divine Edition comes in at around 580 which is also not bad and we'll discuss why so yeah uh this is a board that uh made me feel a lot of feelings and we're going to talk about those feelings and we're gonna tell stories and uh they'll be passed down through the ages maybe written on rocks so yeah intro [Music] how are their ham hairs I literally just put this desk mat on hello let's start with the unboxing experience I will try and not repeat myself too much you guys should all know how I feel about not having a hard case so this doesn't have a hard case uh there is a little sleeve that is in the shape of the Rosetta Stone which is the inspiration for this board so this sleeve is made out of plastic aka the worst kind of garbage and inside of that we have our box which is a nice matte black cardboard box also known as garbage fairly simple uh the uh the text on it is actually in a gold color like foil and there is information on the spec over here so you've got Black Ivory Safari wild card and Simon and in the Divine Edition you have black silver and wild card now before continuing any further uh this is a review unit it was sent to me specifically for review I don't get to keep it it needs to go back uh whether or not I will purchase an actual groove by unit I'll discuss later in this video but uh it's yes I'm going to be purchasing one okay so let's let's open up the box it's a lot easier to do when there's a board inside there all right here we are and the first layer is where your plate and PCB go as soon as you lift that up you've got a bunch of cat hairs inside yes those do come standard this is an Egyptian board so you get your board in here and you get your little Tools in there so that's basically it it's nice it's tight it's compact it just works ew now be really really really really nice to have a hard case as a matter of fact a hard case is a requirement if you buy a board like this uh because I tried to take this to work in a sleeve and I was so terrified I just held on to it all the way to the office and back it terrified the hell out of me and considering that uh this pre-production unit uh had an issue with uh the Scarab just flying off I know I'm pulling very hard that's because I have shimmed it which we'll discuss why later but if I don't shim it and it just sits in there and you're just walking around with your board oh look the Scarab fell off oh no where is it so yeah uh if you get one of these absolutely pick up a hard case the Canon key 65 cases are fantastic they do a great job they're like big cases they're way bigger than the board itself but if you're gonna pick up a Divine Edition definitely pick up a hard case if you don't already have hard cases so uh yeah I guess uh I guess we'll go through the externals uh because this board is all about the externals you'll also have to excuse me because it's still early for me a lot of you said Simon We like all the light in your room it's nice when there's Lighting in your room yeah it sure is [Music] alrighty so let's start at the top the top we have our basically our two layer machined all of these uh gold bits actually set up higher just like they did on the original aru but they are anodized in Gold whereas the base color is black uh there are other colors uh like gold and purple giggle unfortunately uh those at least in terms of the communication so far uh are mystery raffle gotcha Bamboozled uh uh sales model so if you like the purple Divine Edition you can't buy one apparently uh fun fact this is one of the first keyboards of all time where my review is actually going to come out before the group buy so expect the Groupon a few days uh if uh it's still like a mystery raffle gotcha bamboozle Edition that is the technical term uh please voice your concerns and just be like bro I want to buy the purple one or I want to buy buy the blue one or I want to buy the red one so let me buy it so yes very nice in terms of Engravings very nice in terms of finishing uh I have the Normie bottom row here because this is a hot swap variant but if I were to pick one up uh I'd obviously go solder so that's the top here we have ourselves a slider this is a potentiometer slider not a like digital slider this is analog and as a result this doesn't do [ __ ] when it comes to qmk or via because we don't have the firmware support for it yay so uh we'll get to that later but kind of wasteful like eating so much space of a 65 percent uh you do have the option of having a blocker here in place of a slider for some reason uh to be fair though the slider is problematic and was the cause of a lot of my problems which we will also discuss later so let's have a look at the side profile there we go it is a wedge I should probably get a thing to wipe this keyboard with all right there we go so look at that very very basic wedge shape at least from the side right but if we get up in there we can at least see you know we got a little chamfer on the bottom small little chamfer on the top so you know at least at least they're trying all right here's the back which uh if you if you can't tell by my fingerprints uh it's PVD let's clean that up all right so we see there are actually two pieces here on the back there's the very shiny PVD piece but there is additionally a gold piece here that has more hieroglyphs on it here let me let me show it to you on the macro account so check that out so these are two separate parts the bottom part is a I assume uh brass PVD and above that is aluminum with the hieroglyphs on it camera thank you so check that out it's very very cool and we'll talk about what those parts actually do when we look at the internals uh while we're here at the back we do see the port uh the port is inset but not too inset I personally had some issues with the port now you know I have my I have my I test every board with this Cable cable but not really a bear oh oh my oh my God oh my God I just dip this in my coffee oh no no giggle Okay well uh so I've got this cable here that I use for a lot of my testing and I had an issue with it where it wouldn't go all the way in so I push it all the way in it's not in push it all the way in it's not in the the USB ports it's just like a millimeter and a half to two millimeters too far in for something like this Now using a normal USBC cable that like comes with a phone or whatever works just fine it's just the dimensions of this particular one isn't great but like having having a port inset just that much is kind of annoying it means that this portion of your USBC cable needs to be longer than average and you know for a lot of custom Cable jobs especially considering that you know this particular head is a fairly common head when it comes to aftermarket like nice coil cables this just won't work so yeah alrighty and finally the back and of course the Scarab flies out all right back is fairly simple or the bottom pardon this is the back this is the bottom we got four feets we will check out those Feats uh we've got one big weight which is uh it's a shiny boy so there are two weight options when uh you purchase this board one of the weight options looks like a standard Scarab and the other one looks like a standard Scarab where the sun is explode I like the explode it looks very cool it looks very very cool so in terms of half the board is honestly decently Hefty and we can go ahead and weigh it see what it actually weighs it's about just shy of 1700 grams 1.7 kilos built now of course your version May differ because you might be using thinner Caps or heavier Caps or uh a different Scarab which we'll talk about uh yeah but feels decently Hefty it's nice it's nice honestly it's nice from a design standpoint I really like the board I like the original boards why would I not like this one it's fantastic so yeah that's basically the externals let's check out those feats so these are rubber adhesive strip feet so let's check that out let me grab my my foot touching tool if I can find it any feet touches ah there is all right so here we are just scrubber not a huge amount of deformation It's relatively hard this looks like 70a 80a wait it's about 80a hardness and they simply adhere into place I'm not going to pull it up because that would ruin the adhesive now generally I'm more of a fan of feet that you know will pop in or will uh like uh pressure fit in not necessarily adhere but it's fine honestly it's fine uh you can also see that it does pick up a lot of dust in that area considering the bottom is completely flat when you're moving this along your desk which to be fair the feet do a really good job of preventing you from moving it but when you do move it around you will pick up a little bit of dust on the feet it happens happens to the best of us uh the amount of force required to move it up and down is about about 1.9 kilos up and down and a bit less about 1.6 1.7 to move it left to right this is on a desk mat on a wooden table it's not going anywhere so yeah it's uh it's it's definitely a keyboard that I enjoy except for this part which we will talk about I keep saying that there's a lot to talk about once we get into the interior the interior is a little bit Wild uh let me have some coffee ah alrighty I'm gonna start opening it up am I still missing the correct size now I got it it is a 2.0 a hex 2. so I have taken apart this board about five times so far and uh it is uh not an enjoyable experience when you have to do it five times it there's a learning curve it becomes easier after like the second or third disassembly but then again everything becomes easier after you've done it a couple times but it is kind of annoying to do uh considering that this is a hot swap board we will actually be doing a full disassembly which is nice now the weight doesn't come installed when you when you get it originally considering there are two weight options and I assume from a logistics point of view it's easier to just not assemble the weights and just ship you the one that you wanted it's fine honestly all right here we go screws are out but we're still not going to review them alrighty so let's open it up there we go we got ourselves a bottom it's essentially it's perfectly flat bottom we'll talk about the implications of that and uh basically the top is where all the business is happening so I guess we're gonna have to take it apart so let's go for it now this is a mounting method that you've probably never seen so this is gasket but I took the bottom off and it's still fine but Simon how was it gasket well there is this piece here and these pieces here that essentially clamp to the top that sandwich the PCB plate assembly between two rubber gummy snakes now let's go ahead and take it art so this top piece is purely decorative by the way this bit right here now one thing that I did notice on this bit right here prior to moving forward is just clean that real quick I did notice that there were visible Machining marks in here don't give me one second see that you see the the lines so that is an indication that the inside just the inside this is not an issue on the outside the Inside Edge was not polished enough so normally after you machine apart you'll uh you'll pan polish you'll sandblast and then you'll do the finishing in this case it's PVD PVD I don't know if they do sandblast or not but the fact that the outside is totally fine the inside is not means that the inside was not well polished uh this is something that I did relay to Helix but uh we'll talk about that in a bit all right so daughter board basically sits on this PVD piece which uh honestly from its weight I can't really tell if it's brass or not seems like it's a brass don't you dare don't you dare in the comments I know exactly what you're gonna say all right the daughter the daughter board cable actually goes in in a very interesting manner but still not going to talk about that all right so we've taken that bit off and it's still mounted so we essentially have this bar here so this bar which is screwed in at four points and these three things that are screwed in at six points make the mounting structure so what I like to do considering I've done this a few times is do all but one just to make sure that the assembly doesn't go anywhere uh it is it is notable that every single screw is M2 which is great considering how much of a pain in the asses to assemble and disassemble all right so now we're going to pull off these clamps I call them so there we go so these apply pressure downwards and that captures the little gaskets in there but we're still not talking about those all right let's finally take it apart there we go and the last one here and there we go it has a falling apart if you heard a thunk that was the board thunking all right so now we can pull off the plate PCB assembly perfect and we are left with the top and the bottom which is what we'll go through right now oh yeah all right but prior to that it's time for a very particular part of this review you know it you love it it's screwing time all right so in order these are the external case screws so we've got long screws in the back short screws in the front the gold plating on these is not great because you can see that it's starting to rub off a little bit on the knurled edges uh alternatively uh the neural edges just might be that color because I noticed that most of this Cruise kind of look that way so those are the case screws then we have the decorative bar assemblies Cruise right here sure all short length again all M2 all knurled then we have the uh the the mounting top bar screws all four of equal length so these are the ones that actually apply pressure keeping the assembly closed and then finally we have the front side which for some reason are not knurled and are not the correct color and look completely different yeah this will definitely be changed in group by because I have already complained thoroughly it's very very silly having a themed board in which the theme is Egypt and gold and divine and you know you've got all these wonderful wonderful gold screws and then you give me this for the record even this cruise on the daughter Border Gold yet you give me this what is this what is this anyway screw anger aside let's take a look at the bottom piece all right so here's the bottom the bottom is flat completely flat black flat flat you got a little inset here where the the uh the decorative rear bar sits so when I say decorative rear bar I mean this one yes it does hold the daughter board but it's entirely decorative to the mounting and we've got a small little cutout where the daughter board screws will not conflict with the case okay fine uh we got an engraving here designed by Helix lab 2022 giggle and uh pretty much it with the bottom so let's see if we can pull out this uh this weight if I remember correctly it was a different screw size okay so this is 2.0 yeah it's not 2.0 okay so it's probably a 1.5 let's look for a 1.5 what are you 1.3 nope 0.7 .9 2.5 wait this is 1.5 not exist all right I got my backup tools oh there it is hex 1.5 it was in Vita 1.5 all right so four screws hold this together if I remember correctly uh please note that the screws are gold and they are countersunk so they said flush once fully screwed into place so weight should just pop out yep just pops out and here's the wait it's kind of wild so it's two pieces I do not recall if this is brass or steel this is give me a second that steel so it's two PVD pieces you've got the inner gold PVD piece and then the outer silver PVD piece pretty cool so the silver outer piece should be the same for everyone and then basically it's the inner piece that's physically different depending on which one you buy I do like this design it is very cool and it is very very shiny you can tell how shiny it is because you can see my eyes so yeah and that basically just drops into place screws in with M 1.5 countertong screws it's very really simply there's tiny little bit of Wiggle but once it's screwed in there should be no wiggle to speak of so we'll just do the two corners just for sanity checking but I never had any weird like movement sounds yeah that's not going anywhere while this case was assembled yeah let's close this up real quick uh as is customary by the way yes yes they sent me a black unit because I I have lovely hands that totally do not uh destroy black So yeah thank you for sending me black I love black all the black so anyway a single piece of aluminum uh this is 6063 aluminum if I'm not mistaken uh it's very unlikely that it's 61. I'm not going to be able to tell the Sonic difference between 61 and 63. oh yeah bottom is very very simple uh we've got uh basically eight screw Taps inside and the screw Taps if we look very closely are not straight Taps uh they have a little ledge so I'll show you that all right so when the screw goes in it actually makes contact with this part of the top case sorry this part of the bottom case pushing the bottom case into the top case the alternative method would be to basically just do a straight tap where it's just all the way through and the screw would not necessarily interfere with this part but it's fine uh more or less this is a relatively standard way of dealing with it uh normally these little Ledges are just further in but this is a really thin piece so it's kind of easy uh easier to notice on this yeah that's the that's the bottom uh one thing you may have noticed besides my terrible terrible fingerprints is that this is a perfectly flat bottom and if you've ever seen a high-end board or you've been around the block a few times and you've you've seen you know you've seen keyboard designs like these where the bottom is just completely flat you notice that they sound kind of echoey kind of pingy kind of that okay is like the general catch-all term uh the the reasoning behind this is you know uh when you're typing you have uh the sound that will disperse through the case and you've got the sound that will be emitted through the air from the plate PCB assembly and if it's going to hit a perfectly flat surface it's going to come straight back at you like a mirror and essentially it'll sound echoey or pingy or it's basically just going to reflect whatever issues you have in your actual like you know play PCB assembly right back to you is that something really noticeable here a little bit we'll cover that later once we get to sound feel and story time but for now just keep a mental note that the bottom piece is essentially basically flat which is kind of a No-No like if you look at nicer boards and you look at like the internal uh the internal brass weights they'll have a little bit of texture on them they'll they'll have something going on all right next we look at the top so this is the top case this is this is where all the business is now earlier when we talked about the pricing for the Divine Edition I said that that price was actually pretty good but why would I say that why is 580 an acceptable price for something like this well if you look at uh high-end anodization suppliers that can actually do two layer anodization which is what this is the bottom layer is black the top layer is gold uh two layer anodization on even a piece as small as this as small as this is five six seven hundred dollars just for the anodization whereas this entire board is about 580. obviously Helix has found a methodology that is you know more financially feasible so I'm certain that they're not paying hundreds of dollars for the Dual layer anodization but in terms of you know comparison we do have to be fair and understand that stuff like this is not easy to do therefore the price is fair I mean you can tell the base price for the standard one is 430 bucks and it's 430 bucks let's let's not forget this entire top is fully engraved every single protrusion protrudes all the way through the case the case top at the very least which again I respect it you know uh you may not be a fan of the design in which case I if you you're like 40 minutes into this video the crazy person but it is nice if like whether or not you enjoy it there is a degree of complexity and you know awe when you look at it all right so this is the tough case the top case has a bit more going on so we can see divots so these are six little rails for the six little gaskets now those gaskets are these These are gummy snake that is the terminology uh the other acceptable terminology is hot dog uh gummy snake implies that the snake goes all the way around and eats its but uh hot dog implies it's just a hot dog so technically this is hot dog Mounds uh we'll talk about them out in a bit anyway hot dog so we've got our place for that and we've got are mounting points for the mounting rail so this bit here and the mounting clamps which go down there so mounting clams have two screws two screws each for a total of six screws and the top mounting bar has a total of four screws that screw directly into the top case uh while we're here we can also see the case screws that are here and some other places all right uh we see our little uh little blocker there very cute and we see two little screws that actually fit the oh those are those are actually smaller than 1.5 so that fits this little bit here because you do have the option of going with a decorative badge blocker instead of having a slider here which to be fair considering the functionality deficit of the slider maybe might be worth it all right so actual top case design we see again it is a wedge but with a hole missing uh kind of weird to do it this way but fine you know I understand what they were trying to do from a design standpoint it works and then there's some uh some interesting bits here there's uh this and uh I don't know what this is but I can feel a small little texture here that leads me to believe this exists to uh I don't know uh prevent Collision prevent scraping uh that actually does look like it's anodized it could be used as an indication if the uh the anodization is the correct color I have no idea what these are which is really weird because I've spoken to Helix about like everything and I forgot to ask what are these so here let me let me show you what these look like just so you get an idea so it's just a a piece of the same material that is anodized differently and then there's a weird little texture on part of it which you can see there kind of looks like a sticker or whatever so I'm not sure what's going on there so if you know what that is so there are four of them then go for it uh obviously they were hooked from that point maybe this is like I don't know part of the Dueler anodization process like I can see what looks like very very very basic hook marks but then that means it was hooked like this which then means how do you anodize this a different color than this I have no idea I have no idea how the methodology works and to be fair most anodizing or complex anodizing like methodology is kept relatively Secret because they don't they don't want us to know the truth so there we are all right so that's basically the top and bottom so let's look at the remaining pieces so top and bottom basically just leave a little Gap in here so what's in the gap so part one which is the part closest to the top is this you'll remember this was the one that had the that had the struggle focusing there we go the one that had a little bit of hieroglyphs and this is essentially used to mount the plate assembly to the top we see here that it uses two small gaskets per side on this side and on the top side it uses one large gasket for each of these so one large hot dog so big hot dog right there and on this side two small hot dog uh why is this actually a reason I'll get to that and then finally we have our purely decorative back piece which is just PVD we've got our USBC cutout now I've spoken to Helix and requested that this USBC connector could theoretically be moved forward about like a millimeter without without impacting like the design at all and he said he would look into it maybe will help with cable compatibility so we see that the daughter board is screwed into this decorative piece and we see that the daughter board basically is a fully custom data board we've never seen a daughter board like this the uh uses a ribbon cable and the ribbon cable comes in perpendicular to the daughter board itself so it comes straight out and it's a yeah it's uh it's a it's a very weird connector which we'll talk about soon so that is the entirety of the k6 journals minus this is the Scarab this little bugger get it bugger uh was the source of a lot of problems which we're still not going to talk about yet but let's look at the design yeah there's our Scarab it's very cute on the back end has a little bone shape or eye shape or H shape and what that does is it fits onto the little slider assembly of the slider it's pretty cool conceptually very very cool looks very pretty uh so this just kept falling off my board all the time because it was not like there was nothing really keeping it in place now reminder that this is a pre-production version and although a Chinese uh Group by has already happened uh there might be some changes all right so let's talk uh let's talk about the mounting and the plate I guess or do we do story time we do both we do both let's do Story Time as I take this apart all right so we got our little gasket arinos here no actually I'm gonna bamboozle you Let's uh dude how's this hot dog still here you are upside down how are you still there what is this like hot dog gravity all right let's uh let's talk about plate we'll talk about PCB then we'll talk about mounting and then we do story time so late is memes okay I'll save you the hassle now plate is mostly air oh but Simon I can see black stuff between the the yeah just don't worry about it so most of you are going to be shocked that oh my God Simon has actually used bone in this case silicone silicone uh between the plate and the PCB uh this is because without it the plate has no supporting structure it's like unusable absolutely unusable now I have also requested that we get a normal plate because that'd be great I I like uh when my plates are made out of uh metal or plastic and not air so yeah uh here we can see little divots by the way uh those divots in the plate are stamped in in the same way that uh The jion Works F1 the original F1 uh plates worked where you had your hot dog and the hot dog sat perfectly in the hot dog bun and we've got one on the top and we've got one on the bottom as well now this particular plate is aluminum and this particular plate I believe is meant for this particular hot swab layout now I would not recommend hot swap for a variety of reasons especially if you're going to go out and buy a board of this caliber it's not really the best play to go hot swap but um it's all right so we can see that it is Aluminum and looks like low 6000 series or 5000 series so probably 50 53 or it could be uh it wouldn't be 6061 because you can't get it at this thickness this is a probably a uh 5053 plate could be 50 52. it does feel a little bit more rigid than I would expect so might have a temper on it anyway uh this is anodized in a gold color uh this is not a brass plate it's an aluminum plate it's a very very flimsy very light plate which I'm not the biggest fan of and uh basically any place you can see black is where there is no plate and that's just the custom molded silicone that exists between the plate and PCB assembly now in my original build uh I tried building it without the silicone and uh it sounded like a Radley echoey terribly pinginess uh the designer Helix R uh was watching the live stream twitch.tv Simon uh while I was building and he's like bro you should really put the rubber in there and I was like nah it'll be fine yeah turns out you really need the rubber in there so uh one thing to keep out uh to keep an eye out for is during the group by uh please make sure that there are real plate options like a full plate a solid plate a plate where there isn't a bajillion holes in it that would be great all right so that is our plate uh we see our gasket Mount tabs gasket Mount tabs work fine essentially they are sandwich gaskets so you've got hot dog here hot dog here smush there is your gasket Mount uh I will at some point take these switches out so we can you know take a look at everything else but uh there isn't much going on with the plate and you can check it out for yourself it's uh it's uh yep it's a plate with a lot of holes in it we can see where the slider goes through essentially uh that's pretty much it you know they're acoustic Cuts but then those acoustic Cuts get filled in with silicone which again makes no sense to me anyway I would very much like to have a full plate that'd be nice all right PCB so PCB has perky RGB because of course it does and this particular version here is hot Swap this uses a rpe controller an RP 2040 uh let's find out on the macro cam where am I pointing where's my thumb there it is sorry what are you RP 2 A2 and then I've got additional controllers down here got ourselves uh a large big boy unclear what that is and unclear what that is there's a lot going on uh I presume that one of these two here are actually used for the slider assembly and ah one is used as a bridge between the standard controller and that but again reminder I am not big smart PCB man I am Simon all right so uh we got ourselves a bottom facing physical reset button kind of weird normally with a uh with an RP controller you'll have a toggle switch so you can toggle to Bootloader and back but fine reset switch also works uh not much to see here A bunch of hot swap sockets perky RGB which is really silly on a board like this but fine whatever and we can see where the slider assembly is soldered now these are hand soldered because they are so large uh that they literally just cannot be soldered at the factory it's a decent feeling slider uh the subtle job on it is not amazing on my particular unit uh the assembly sits a little bit too far to the right you can see that the Gap over here is larger than the Gap over here when you hand solder stuff it's really hard to get it to sit firmly uh we'll take we'll take a better look at this once we get all the switches out of this but uh daughter board sorry uh PCB is simple besides the daughter board connection over here which uses a ribbon cable uh very interesting ribbon cable for the record uh it's it's incredibly like thin and like weighs nothing and will just like Bend uh they do send you two by the way because these do look a little bit fragile uh but the way in which they Assemble or connect is actually pretty cool so let's check that out so it connects there so what you do is you slide it in just like that it doesn't slide all the way in by the way part of the conductive material is still visible right and then you close it it's a little latch see that see that little latch so this is closed so I can't pull it out and now it's open and I can pull it out let's put it in again let's close it there we go closed it and it's in there it's quite cool it's quite cool I like this because it does not take up much space uh it's it's like acoustic cross section it's basically zero it's not going to affect the sound at all I mean like everything affects sound but like it's its impact on sound is going to be basically zero which is pretty cool uh I did find that it was a Teensy bit like flimsy when you hold it but I've done like like 10 connections disconnections like rebuilds it's been fine so I guess it's okay uh all right last bit before we start big complaining about stuff is there is a flex cut here that's its basically uh between your your zedro and your arrow sorry your Q row and your arrow and it gives you a little little tiny bit of flex which fine all right so we'll talk about the mounting as I go through story time all right but prior to that let me finish this coffee off off screen alrighty so I received this a while back and like all of my keyboard reviews I like to spend a decent amount of time uh typing on the board to get an idea of you know the the sound the feel the little the little bits that you know all add up to make a keyboard good bad mediocre Etc I built this on stream and uh it was a d sub-a-thon stream if if you're not familiar with the subathon stream it's it's like a subathon where when people sub uh the stream gets longer but the opposite of that uh when uh people sub the stream gets shorter uh it was still like a three hour stream and considering that this is a hot swap board that Simon how the hell did it take you three and a half hours to build a hot swap board well here's the thing when I assembled it I was like okay that was that was a seamless experience besides having to go through and Fiddle with all the gaskets and really struggle then it sounded kind of weird it sounded rattly and I was really confused and everyone in chat was being like hey Simon your stabs are terrible you don't know how to do stabs you're an idiot Simon you've you've never done stabs in your life it's not like you've built hundreds of keyboards and can literally do stabs in your sleep no you totally messed up the stab Simon so I took it apart uh the first build for the record was without the silicone piece so I took it apart I cleaned up the stabs again put some more Lube in there you know and uh putting the silicone piece reassembled the whole thing which is a pain in the ass I'll walk you through the process by the way and it still sounded like really rattly it sounded like my stabs were like all broken now normally I use my standard Cherry clip in stabs that I get from China they cost about five dollars and 31 cents for a tkl kit uh never really had a major problem with them that have like one stab failure out of like a hundred which is totally fine but these particular stabs were not that these were stabs that I got from Kate because I ran out of stabs so I presumed oh okay she's just got like really sussy stabs or something it's fine I'll get replacement stabs down the line so we've finished up the assembly and all that so as a sanity check much much later after really struggling like I took it to work and it just sounded so Bradley and I brought it back home and you know just just to make sure that I wasn't crazy I had Paul come over uh you guys know Paul he's the designer of the Buddy the uh type B the suffer and some other boards like the pedals anyway he came over with C3 stab wires so if you're not familiar with C3 Stabler C3 stab wires are like amazing you can buy like you know a five dollar or like two dollar terrible Chinese uh clip-in stabilizer set you put in C3 wires everything is fixed it's amazing so he plugged those in there uh he tuned the stabs himself and then we typed on it and it was Radley which was not a fun experience so at that point I was like all right this board just sounds rattly and terrible it's fine I guess that's what it is I'm gonna go type on it at the office and uh start making my notes as I type on it for the next four weeks so I started writing down all of my scathing notes I was Furious as to why this sounded so bad and it made no sense to me very few people had assembled these except for people that got them in the Chinese buy but I couldn't really find any reliable information of like how do you make it not sound rattly so yeah at that point I basically started drafting up a Manifesto to send to Helix because believe it or not the purpose of a review is critique not to just tell people hey you should buy this board just because money no okay so I started I started writing it up okay there we go here's our here's our silicone piece by the way uh it it fits very very well I would prefer if it wasn't required for a plate like this but essentially this this plate weighs nothing just just for reference you understand what this plate weighs give me a second at least 34 grams this plate weighs 34 grams a space bar weighs six that's like four space bars or five or six space bars you get the idea it's really really light so I started I I started I started just typing typing typing typing all all my issues with the board which we're going to go through okay turns out interestingly enough that the Scarab uh when you type on the board this carrot moves around because it's basically held in by hopes and dreams and you know what the Scarab sounds like it sounds like rattly stabs I know you guys can't hear that but here just to see you guys hear it let me let me get my mic nice and close I know that this is the incorrect mic don't consider this a proper sound test we'll get to that [Music] so uh yeah I came to the realization that the uh this carob was the sound of the rattle all along which nobody told me about I figured it out after a while uh I had spoken to Frank Frank the Tank uh who is I believe the only other person who streamed the build it took me five rebuilds to figure it out it also took him five rebuilds to figure it out we both rebuilt our boards five times to get an idea of what the heck have we done wrong we can't possibly be that bad so anyway Let's uh let's let's let's do my notes that I sent to Helix because that will also discuss mounting as well so I sent them bit by bit as I would basically write my own notes for a video like this and went through each individual portion first portion was Kate uh case and fitment I told him Hey listen finishing very well done there are some Machining marks visible through the uh uh through the electroplate of the PVD back piece on the interior just the interior and uh for each of these I'll give you a response from Helix if there is a response so they've made alterations already during the Chinese buy where the inner surfaces are now sandblasted prior to PVD which is great now I said a fully flat case bottom may not be great for sound which I covered later in the sound portion but just keep a mental note the other thing I said is the daughter board USB connect your depth is a little deeper than most boards and moving the daughter border USB connector a little closer to the outside would help with custom cable compatibility and Helix said okay we'll try to move the USB port about half a millimeter or a millimeter forward in future batches which is great because that's all you really need to basically get custom cables in there I also said that the Scarab fitment is very problematic it can easily fall out while being carried in a case and then just scratch the [ __ ] out of your case and they said Scarab is being worked on which we'll cover later as well boom and then I complained about the silver screws told him why and they said that we'll change those six screws for uniformity they didn't think it mattered that much due to them being on the inside of the case but again this is a 580 at least this version 65 percent there should be no cut Corners I want all the screws to be gold all right in terms of PCB and electricals I said that on my unit the slider is misaligned by like 0.2 millimeters because this can cause sound issues by the way like especially if it starts contacting this or you know if it's at an angle uh the reason why the Scarab makes the sound just sound so rattly is because the entirety of the vibrations of the PCB basically radiates through this little Point here it acts as like as like a little tuning fork so like if you type and you touch this you can feel everything so loose carob kind of annoying this being offset just the time the tiniest bit also very annoying and then uh the response was that all the faders are hand soldered they can be done uh via smt because it needs to be inserted into the board instead of just placing it up top the alignment is done with three pins and three corresponding holes and like they've done what they can but tldr they can't do much more in terms of alignment realistically if you get one and you notice that you know it's not sitting perfectly flat you could desolder and solder it it's three solder points all right uh I told them that the daughter board clasp and a little cable is cool but the cable is very stiff I've done at that point five rebuilds and the cable kind of looks like it might break soon uh but they said yeah we're always going to include an extra cable just so people have it uh doing it without tweezers helps a bit uh for future projects they might change the cable type but for the ro65 basically you're just gonna get two cables and to be fair two cables is fine you don't need more than two cables all right uh next mounting and feel now the mounting Force seems pretty hard okay now these gaskets themselves These Guys these hot dogs are are hard dude these are hard I don't have a durometer like a hardness tester but these feel like 78 to 80a they're they're tough dude these are very tough and keep in mind that essentially you have 88 under an 80a on top as well so it's it's it's a it's it's it's rough so I said hey could could you offer something a little softer they said yes it's possible uh also looking at poron for a rubber alternative uh whether or not this actually makes it to this round of group by that's coming up soon unclear but softer gaskets would be nice uh a plate that doesn't literally weigh nothing would also be nice and I said that the overall feel and sound is consistent but a standard full plate would be nice as the so this is just not great and they said that we're waiting to test and compare sounds with a full plate without cutouts and PC plates Etc we'll try a full play Works without silicone in terms of sound ultimately the depression height of the plate as a whole is limited by the depth of those hot dog channels changing hot dog materials from silicone to poron May provide additional softness yeah still I'd like real plate options all right now there's a sound section sound section when as follows it took me five free bills to figure out that the loose care was causing the sound of the board to sound like cradly stabs I told him a small silicone insert between the slider stem and Scarab would be the best solution for this or modifying the bottom of this carob to allow for a tighter pressure fit so uh basically a v-shape instead of a straight shape so when you shove it in there it like really holds on uh I said that the slider stem can also Bend during assembly and disassembly uh basically if you don't take the plate PCB assembly straight from the top and you bend it a little bit the case will actually Bend this uh this uh I don't know what this is called slider stem I guess uh also said a fully flat bottom piece maybe uh maybe the culprit for the loud and echoey sound of the keyboard have you experimented with Grill Cuts or adding any sort of complexity on the bottom to try and resolve this uh and then I said that the stock plate full of holes is relatively high pitched and sound reflective so can we get something like this that isn't terrible and then finally I said that the flex cutting the PCB is good because I'll show you guys that you can actually notice the uh benefit from this however having a silicone insert or tape or something to at least fill that hole would be great and then the responses were uh Scarab yes Scarab will be redone uh as a matter of fact Scarab is going to be redone for all the Chinese units there were 300 units sold in China and all of them are getting replacement scarabs which is going to be a long and costly Endeavor but at the very least they're going back and fixing it for everyone because the Radley's care of issue literally destroys the board I was able to resolve it by taking a piece of paper just an A4 piece of paper and shoving it in there and then closing it and it was fine but we shouldn't have to do that for a 580 dollar board all right so uh in terms of this bending uh helix's response was simply skill issue just have skill and don't bend it while disassembling it uh for uh grill or more complex bottoms they will try prototyping uh I doubt it's something we're gonna see in the current Group by round but hopefully in the future uh whether or not it's required whether or not it helps remains to be seen and then so uh we'll play it is possible and plastic plate is possible so hopefully we actually get real plates please dear God and uh yeah that's pretty much it I also complained about no hard case and I had a extended discussion with Helix R about a hard case my logic was Hey listen you you've gone all wild with like all these Engravings and you've got a theme and the theme works like it's a it's a cool theme how have you not designed like a super like super nice hard case like a [ __ ] in hard case like you don't have to sell it with the board you don't have to sell it at a normal hard case price of like twenty dollars if you're gonna do like you know raised portions and all that you can you can sell a 50 hard case as long as you know it's really nice for fifty dollars so they'll try basically uh it turns out that having like like parts that come out on a hard case are kind of hard to do and considering moqs like that have to make like a thousand of them and that thousand they're not gonna sell a thousand of these I mean it'd be nice if they sold a thousand of these but hard case would be nice for the time being if you are a buyer and you buy one of these just pick up a Canon Keys hard case or something like that but I really think it's a huge missed opportunity that the Helix has not made like a hieroglyph hard case like look at this design like they have the design aspects like they've got like the design ideology just just make a hard case just make a hard case anyway so that was all the responses from Helix now like I said earlier a review should be a review it should be a critique and a good maker is the maker that will take your critique and actually act upon it with the goal of actually making an improved product which based on helix's response is what I see happening which is great uh how much of that will actually get for this group by round I'm not sure at the very least the major issue the Scarab is confirmed resolved uh and then some smaller things like oh the screws are the wrong colors also resolved but for you know the little sound tuning things that will probably take time that will probably take multiple variations for them to figure it out I understand that yeah they've been working on this for like two years and it is time for an International Group buy so let's put this together and as I put this together I'll walk you through basically the assembly process so part one is you for this plate absolutely need the silicone there's no way around it there is no way around it the nice thing though is it fits pretty snugly like what's once you get the alignment it'll just drop into place basically sure wish I got the alignment oh there we go there we go perfect now I am using a Vertex V1 switches which are switches that I have not really used in the past I'm not going to go into detail about them here I'll go into detail uh on my next review which will be the Canon Keys brutal 1800 V2 where I use these switches as well I think they they like they worked really well on that on this one I don't know if they worked well or not because it's just like all the sound issues I had from this board at least now it sounds fine I don't want to you know go and blame the switches and whatnot uh these are made by jwk these are jaywicks they do not use jwk molds these are fully custom molds uh top bottom and stem are fully custom and they're Factory lubed in the 30 cents I like them I uh like the Springs were not my favorite but then again you know like a lot of people ask me hey Simon what did you think of them and I'm like they were great but the Springs are kind of terrible and then they gave me a logical response which is hey name one like like stock switch that has a a good stock spring oh yeah Fair Point fair point I don't know I feel like if you're gonna do fully custom molds at that point at least at least get better Springs all right so assembly wise these switches uh click very firmly into the plate even this like terribly sussy plate that's made out of air but they clip in very very well uh generally that's very very important otherwise you'll end up with crooked switches and you're not gonna have a good time of course when the group buy comes around please please please please everybody make sure that there are options for real plates as in play it's not made out of air because I understand that you know this was originally designed for the Chinese market hence the perky RGB and like all the memes and like a hot swap as default uh for the record I think you'll have the option between hot Swap and solder like without paying extra but you know the Western Market especially when we're looking at something of this price point I don't know where I visualize this as a very high-end board I visualize this as like one of the most high-end 65s possible because from like a visual standpoint from a functionality standpoint from a mounting standpoint from like all of that like you've got to be at the highest level to you know request the price that you are requesting especially for the Divine Edition but as long as the full plates that I hope are included in the group by give me a second I got a cat here okay come on buddy come on buddy all right we got it all right so as long as a full plate is offered or a real plate is offered and it's made by the same manufacturer that does this plate I assume the tolerances are going to be just as tight which means your switches are going to clip in just fine normally I'm kind of afraid when it comes to hawkswap when it comes to hot swap builds and hot swap uh pcbs is like uh you look at something like the uh like the uh the sand glass Ergo where the plate was incapable of holding the switches in place which then meant if you're trying to take your caps off you ended up taking your switch out and if your switch is that easy to take out that means it's not firmly in place which means there are there are like acoustic consequences of that if it physically is like rattling the teensiest bit in there you're gonna hear that maybe not directly but you'll you'll get the premise of something doesn't sound right something sounds a little inconsistent you know it's my board Radley are my stabs bad am I bad at building no you just have a plate that isn't capable of holding your switches firmly anyway uh PCB wise never really had a problem with this PCB uh I I did a uh I did an oopsy poopsie where I hit a key combo that inverted my uh my uh left control and left win or in my case left-win and left Alt but apparently that was just a key combo uh PCB Sports via RGB seems to work fine uh in terms of me going into via and turning it off that worked fine so yeah uh cannot complain cannot complain now uh this little guy right here uh they sent me the uh the user manual for how do you make this work and essentially you have to download some sort of software and then like you have to get your computer to see if it's a midi device then you need to have another piece of software where you can like map it so like it actually like can do volume control or stuff like that so yeah I did none of that uh when I get my like actual like group by unit maybe I'll go through the effort uh it would be really really nice if we had qmk or via you know support for actual analog potentiometers that'd be great uh I know that you know there are many many ways of handling it but like I just wish I could use it interestingly enough during usage the amount of times that I would try to use this as page up page down just naturally without thinking about it where I'd be on a page and I just want to scroll down the page and I'd use this without even thinking about it so it'd be really cool if we could get something like that natively within via if you know we we could support the hardware that'd be amazing instead of you know needing via for this part and then you need something else for this part but yeah that is uh that is my two cents all right so we have got our assembly fully assembled our play PCB assembly so how do we actually put this together all right here we go so part one you get your top piece and you put it upside down okay you get out all your long hot dogs okay not to be confused with your short hot dogs okay it's very important long hot dog get your long hot dogs here you put it in all the holes right there you want to make sure that they're not popping out from one side to the other because the amount of force that actually sandwiches this is kind of hardcore so there's our six hot dogs perfect so our six hot dogs are done what do we do now well now we can drop the plate PCB assembly right onto the hot dogs all right and we want to make sure that the slider actually goes through the hole you can tell that it's not hello all right pull it out let's try and get the slider in the thing first there we go okay so yeah slider stem kind of really annoying to deal with but just make sure that you get it through all right now that we've done that the next step is to arrange the rest of the hot dogs so what I like to do is use the back piece here which has the small hot dogs so this would oh we just dropped a bunch of hot dogs which is fine but I'm missing one all right well at some point we're gonna find it so our goal is to get these small little hot dogs in place I like to use tweezers for this just to like struggle a little bit harder there we go small little hot dogs they go right on The Ridges so they're small little ridges right there that are perfectly hot dog sized I feel like I have lost one and I have no idea where it is we'll cross that bridge when we get to it so you get your small hot dogs on The Ridges we try and align them as best you can okay all the hot dogs are in place all right I'm just making sure that I didn't lose a random hot dog inside the assembly because that would suck all right then what do we do we get this piece on we try and come straight down as to not disturb the hot dogs like so and it flies out perfect so now we repeat what we did again hot dogs go in the hot dog holes so you got to be really really careful when you put this piece on because if anything is like misaligned then you're not gonna have a good time it's gonna sound weird it's gonna feel weird and it's probably not gonna fit together all right let's try again so again this piece comes down like so Perfect all right I'm going to hold this with one hand I'm gonna grab one of these long screws which I'm praying is the correct screw I'm going to try and close this with my non-dominant hand alright so we got it a little screwed in which is perfect we're just trying to hold the top right now as we go and work on the bottom now the bottom relies on these little clamps right here so the clamps are directional you can see that one side is filleted and the other side is just a hard corner so that tells us which direction they go in on the opposite side that being the bottom you can see that there's a little spacer here that spacer makes it so you actually use two small hot dogs in this landing area so I'll demonstrate using the middle hot dog mounting point I can find my tweezers there they are so what we do is we put a hot dog to the left a dog to the right and we make sure that that matches up with our little Gap here and then we drop it in we use our silver screws which should be gold screws on the group by variant and do a little screw in on one side do a little screwing on the other side all right just to make sure that it's held in place and we're okay so we've done this now we got to do that two more times don't do that two more times and I am absolutely missing a hot dog for the record it could be anywhere there we go and there we go again making sure to leave a gap in the middle then we come in with our clamp make sure it's facing the right way drop it into place again I'm not going to fully screw this in hard just just trying to catch the thread okay and you guys may notice that I put this in backwards this is the bottom not the top so we take it out again we make sure that the hot dogs are still in place okay and we put the clamp in correctly this time and then we screw it in see some of you may think that I did that on purpose no this is this is difficult to put together even with a lot of experience all right so I have one hot dog and I need two hot dogs the hot Doggers any hot Doggers okay did I drop it on me no okay we have a single hot dog there hmm so we're hot dog wear hot dog wear hot dog hot dog wear see working on a black desk mat makes it hard to find a black hot dog all right we got it again we drop it into place trying to keep adequate spacing like so we come in with our clamp make sure that it's not upside down this time there we go and clamp assembly so normally I don't walk through the build like this but for a board like this it's kind of important that you have an idea of here is how it fits together all right so basically I've only half tightened all of these I'm gonna go in and basically screw in the rest of the screws for the for the back portion of the mount in the same way that you would screw in a tire you want to kind of do it radially so you you know keep some sort of uh distribution without pinching any of the gaskets or anything like that so I'm kind of just like going through tightening a little bit going through tightening a little bit I'm also I'm also feeling to see if uh anything feels weird if anything feels weird it means that you know your gasket may have slipped and you want to unscrew that bit check your gasket screwing it and then screw it in again uh if you just yellow it you're probably not gonna have a good time it's quite complex when it comes to its assembly in terms of does the does the complexity offer any benefit absolutely not but hey it is a design choice and using clamped top mount gasket sandwich gasket is fine if you are a designer and you want to use it go for it all right so there we go we got our Mount fully mounted so at this point we can just close it up essentially and uh yeah all right so while I do that I'll talk about the uh the typing sound and the typing feel now I'm going to give you these notes based on the assumption that a lot of changes are going to be made notably to the Scarab issue so the typing feel is a little bit harder than I would like and I know this sounds like deja vu because I say that about every single board that isn't hilariously Flexi but taking into account the mounting type it's a little stiff for its mounting type and that can be resolved by getting softer uh softer hot dogs just slightly softer hot dogs you know it's the teensy teensy bit because the whole point of a gasket is one isolation and two a little bit of Bounce and it there isn't too much bounce on this board there's the teensiest bit so the bounce that you get is the bounce in which uh your bottom outs don't feel as harsh as they would on a top mount but you don't get any actual bounce bounce so it's a little on the stiff side I'd go I'd possibly go with like if we have an option A softer plastic plate I think it would benefit a lot from it or at the very least you know a softer bottoming out feeling switch something like nixie's milky tops something that isn't going to bottom out super harsh is what I would recommend all right so we're nearly done we just got to get the back on I got them in the bottom in terms of typing sound uh once you've resolved the Scarab issue sounds okay okay sounds a little bit Hollow and that might be due to the bottom just being perfectly flat doesn't sound absurdly hollow and when I say hollow hollow could be a good thing Hollow could be a bad thing uh having a hollow sounding board means you get a boomier sound if we look at something like the Jaguar the jaguar sounds Hollow does it sound hollow in a bad way no but it does sound hollow uh I am by no means comparing this to the Jaguar sound because the Jaguar sound is amazing the sound of this is acceptable at best I think that with enough effort you can make this board sound acceptable I don't think with all the tuning in the world you couldn't make this board sound great but again sound is open to interpretation everybody has their preference I do like how boomy it sounds uh I just just part of me wishes that the bottom was not perfectly flat so we could at least you know get some sort of benefit out of it all right so here we are we have assembled our aru and we've basically talked about sound and feel have we not let me check my notes uh yeah I mean uh I'll put this together we will do a typing test but uh uh prior to that this might end up being a lot like the uh the angle tkl situation in which the original thing that I review ends up being wildly different from the actual International Version so uh I will be picking up an international version a group by version uh in solder layout in a color that I like preferably with a real play and uh I will be reviewing that as well uh it'll be the same type of review where it'll be a differential review of here are the differences so I'm not going to re-review it from scratch uh this video is intentionally longer than usual to account for the fact that here's the board and here's the expected changes from there there will be a video in which I say hey they made the expected changes or they didn't make the expected changes and here's why all right so I'll see you guys on typing test foreign right so keep in mind those of you that just listened to the sound test uh the Scarab issue is an issue you should not have it is something that should be resolved in the group by run but you can tell it's oof it is so I'm very sorry to everybody that was in the Chinese buy and anybody that has a pre-production unit of this uh it is easily solvable for the record you put a little piece of tissue a little piece of paper in there and just make sure that it fits firmly as to not rattle anyway summary time the summary is as follows a helix has been incredibly responsive and Incredibly open to all of my notes and you know all of my impressions that makes them objectively a very good maker because they're willing to listen to criticism and actually make improvements so hopefully there should be a large amount of improvements on the group Byron of the ro65 I for one really like the board uh I am not keeping this version because it's pre-production and because it's black I will be purchasing a purple Divine Edition now uh during the group I run uh at least it was previously planned that you cannot pick your special color you can either pick silver or black or random uh please uh if you are interested in purchasing one in one of the nicer colors and I'll I'll link uh a uh a gallery of the nicer colors Below in the description please push for those to be viable options we should be able to buy the things that we like aside from that it's a unique board it's probably one of the nicest looking 65s ever made for me personally maybe not in this colorway but for me personally just like I said with the original aru this is a board where if you like the design you're gonna go for it and you're gonna you're gonna love it and if you don't like the design then it's fine anyway the original rootkl had glaring sound issues and to be fair the ro65 has improved it doesn't have glaring sound issues with the exception of the Scarab which should be resolved uh hopefully Helix makes all the changes that we need changed and I'm pretty sure they will uh they've been very responsive and they're willing to retroactively go back and fix all of the Chinese Group by units that's 300 plus units which is good to see it's good to see a maker that actually cares from a price point perspective the base version is 430 bucks which is fine the Dual layer anodized Divine Edition is 580 which is fine uh I will be buying one I will find the money and I will absolutely buy one uh I know that this review has been long but this review basically covers all of my uh specific problems and all of the specific responses from Helix for all of those problems so if you are interested in this board I do recommend you actually sit through the whole review I know it's long just grab some coffee and uh I don't know play some chess or something anyway so my RO review this I I like this board that's basically it I like this board I am buying it need I say more it's a fantastic board I don't even like 65s this is the first 65 that I have liked in many many many years uh it'd be really nice if I could use this analog slider to actually issue via or qmk commands or key codes that'd be great uh maybe someday we just need a big smart PCB people to do big smart things and allow me to do uh allow me to scroll using this because that would be amazing anyway uh thank you all for watching if uh if you like long form super in-depth keyboard reviews and you want to see more of them uh subscribe leave a like uh hop in our Discord or come catch me on stream where the vibe is a little bit different on stream uh it's more fun and less educational but you'll still learn something along the way so yeah thanks for watching my review goodbye foreign

Channel: Blacksimon

Views: 3,717

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Id: O0kKt6TL1FY

Length: 94min 11sec (5651 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023