The Stabilizer Problem: How Norbauer Developed His Pencil for the Spectacular Cryptanalysis and the Seneca

This is a keyboard nerd’s luxury keyboard. It’s wild that Norbauer spent half a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing it, and that he actually pulled it off. The switches and stabilizers alone are a tremendous achievement, and right now the Seneca is the only place they live.

The thing that’s interesting about the Seneca is not that it’s expensive. It’s easy to make something expensive. There is a keyboard obsessive who has spent his entire career making the best possible keyboard and trying to make his own switches and stabilizers. It would be a fascinating story even if he’d failed.

“I think about my long-term vision for what we’re doing as being kind of like Leica, the camera company. They do crazy things, like their camera. I think it’s a very technically interesting thing. A small audience is for it. And so in order to make it in any reasonable way, you have to charge a ton for it, because how many people on Earth are going to buy it? I am happy that that exists in the world.

He did not like most of the aspects of running a business while he was transitioning from Norbauer & Co to a company that sold keyboards. When you are selling a few dozen do-it-yourself housings to Topre enthusiasts as a self-funding hobby, this is not a huge problem. If you’re trying to build a business that sells fully custom luxury keyboards, it might become a problem.

While he was working on the switches, he tackled the stabilizer problem. The mechanism that connects the space bar, shift, enter and backspace is called stabilizers and is used to make sure the whole key moves down at the same rate. They work, but they sound terrible, unless you find some way to stop the wire from rattling in the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the various plastic parts from rubbing together. Usually this involves some combination of lubes, greases, and physical damping. Tuning the stabilizers is the most time-consuming and tricky part of most keyboard builds.

He hired an electrical engineering firm to design the PCB, which he figured would be the hardest part, since Topre switch clones are pretty easy to come by. That took about a year, on and off. I realized that I have to make all the other stuff. And that took about five years.”

The project turned into a deliberate exercise in making the best keyboard he possibly can, regardless of cost, somewhere along the line. “It was one of those things where my ambitions just kind of spiraled out of control.”

He figured he could do better. His first prototypes sounded great, but they were just as wobbly as Topre. His second design had tighter tolerances so it was quieter but it sounded worse. He wanted to get a deeper sound. Each revision required more injection-molded tooling as he searched for the best combination of feel and sound.

They are smooth and less wobbly, with a deeper sound than the Topre designs, which is most famously found in the Happy Hacking Keyboard. Unlike every other Topre switch, the housings don’t interfere with the Cherry-profile keycaps. (This is a bigger deal than it may sound; it means the Seneca works with thousands of aftermarket keycap sets, instead of the bare handful that work with Topre boards).

Towards the Best Keyboard in the World: Using a New, Fast, Compliant Beam to Solve the Handlube Problem

It was originally planned to use hand-lubed MX stabilizers. I thought it would be interesting to see if there was a way to solve this problem without using lubrication to make the sound go away.

It took several years for the stabilizers to be developed, and he said that it was a personal cash bazooka. His first attempt, mostly on his own, resulted in what he considered a “90 percent solution” — better than anything on the market, without lube. There is more than 80% there, 10 percent not there. He started over at one point.

He worked with a firm that specializes in kinematics to develop a totally new stabilizer mechanism. Actually, they came up with two new stabilizer mechanisms. The first is a compliant-beam design that’s significantly better than existing stabilizers as well as his first prototype. It’s much less prone to rattle or tick. It’s as close to perfect as you can get without totally rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design has five times the number of pins as a standard stabilizer. It’s hideously expensive to produce and both time consuming and fiddly to assemble, but it’s better.

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

Norbauer’s Seneca Keycap Project: How to Make It Work for a Better, Faster, Better, Cheaper PCB

This is an illustrative example of Norbauer’s general approach, which is that solving technical problems is more interesting than trying to reduce production costs. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate extreme. We want to make this good, and that’s all that matters. And so whenever there was a branch, I was like, ‘Let’s go with the rightest way to do it and damn the costs.’ The philosophy of the board has been that.

The Seneca’s case is milled from solid aluminum, with an MAO plasma-oxide finish; he had to set up a company in China in order to source it. There’s a warm gray option called travertine, which has a matte, slightly speckled stonelike look, and a lighter gray called oxide, which looks a bit like concrete. They are comfortable to the touch. There is also a matt black version, which I have not seen in person, and a nearly $8,000 titanium option.

The switchplate is milled from solid brass, for the acoustic properties, and then chrome-plated for aesthetics. Aluminum would have been cheaper, lighter, and easier to mill, but brass absorbs sound better, so brass it is. A galvanic isolation chip is located in the PCB to make it difficult for a rogue power supply to cause a blast of electricity into the keyboard. The Lemo connection on the cable is expensive. Lemo connectors are more secure than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and cool is better, and it’s his keyboard.

The keycaps are most custom parts of the board. He would not have designed a new keycap profile if he wasn’t doing it. He looked into it, but in the meantime MTNU came out. MTNU’s spherical top surfaces and centered legends have exactly the aesthetic Norbauer was looking for, and it’s more comfortable to type on than other retro-looking keycap profiles like SA or MT3. All he had to do was pick the colors.

Each Seneca is made by hand in Norbauer’s garage in Los Angeles, at a rate of one or two per day, by either Norbauer or Taeha Kim, the employee/ investor who builds the keyboard.

One hour or two per keyboard is the length of time needed to make the pin holes large enough for the (precision-ground) pins to fit in using the stabilizers alone.

The stabilizers, like the switches, took years to develop. They’re hideously complicated and overengineered, finicky to put together, and they’re without a doubt the best stabilizers in the world. The keys do not emit a rattle or tick, the spacebar is not louder than the rest of the keys, but it is still quiet to my ears.

It is possible to get an amazing keyboard for a cost of not much. Obviously. It’s very easy not to spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You can spend less than $100 for a board that is off the shelf. For less than 10 percent of the price of the Seneca, you can get a barebone keyboard, add any switches and stabilizers you want, and have more control over the end result. (Strong endorsement here for the Classic-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You can get a Realforce keyboard for $250 and fall in love with the Topre switches that launched Norbauer on the path to the Seneca all those years ago.

When I sold, I was unable to sell. And then I sold it to Tiny, but I didn’t get the money. (An interview with Bernabe)

I would not have recovered my R&D costs when I sold the first batches, or the second batches, or the fourth batches. And it’s an interesting question. So, I’m bad at business.”

He says that his aftermarket housing business was not profitable for most of the time. “My goal has always been basically to break even while also doing really cool R&D stuff. I’m not personally losing a ton of money. But the Heavy Grail, for example, was a very popular offering. It sold more than I thought it would. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, but 100 percent of what would have been profit went into that.”

Last year, when the Seneca was mostly developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical tasks, he sold just under half the company to the investment firm Tiny, run by an old acquaintance. Norbauer still retains total creative control, but he can focus on developing keyboards while other people handle the “making money” part of it.

Other people, in this case, is Caleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co.’s executive in residence. In a 12,000-word blog post announcing the sale, Norbauer writes, “He acts essentially as our COO, but his job description is basically doing all the things that I hate — a skillset at which he inexplicably but admirably excels.”

Source: How to build the best keyboard in the world

A Dating Website for Norbauer and his Topre tenkeyless and Leopold Tenkeyless Keyboards (Delta 1 May 2019)

He also wanted more control over the other aspects of the board, and he wanted something to offer people who like the Norbauer aesthetic but aren’t up for buying a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the warranty, and transplanting the guts into a new case.

Each was a chance to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing capability, and to experiment with different materials (steel, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (polishing, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

There was the Norbaforce, for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, and the Heavy-6 and Heavy-9, for the Leopold FC660C and FC980C, respectively. His most popular housing in 2020 was the Heavy Grail.

Topre keyboards are not used often compared to mechanical keyboards. In order to make them, only a few companies have made them, so there are no layout options and they are more expensive. They’re also harder to customize, with only a few different dome options; they also aren’t compatible with most aftermarket keycaps out of the box. And while metal cases are common in enthusiast mechanical keyboards, Topre keyboards only come in plastic. The Topre boards have a dedicated fan base because the domes give them a nice tactility.

The dating website led to two more startups. After selling his three startup in 2010, he started learning how to make Star Trek prop replicas and began to explore new interests. It also led him to Topre keyboards.

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this got him a website, a startup, and tendonitis. Proper typing form required a hands hovering over the keyboard like a pianist. When he tried to find a more comfortable keyboard, he fell into an obsession.

Norbauer has a habit of wanting things that don’t exist, then figuring out how to build them from scratch. He had an idea a long time ago for a dating website. “I didn’t have any money at all. I dropped out of a PhD program and I just had this idea for a company I wanted to start I can’t hire someone to code for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess I just have to learn how to code.’”

In West Virginia, Norbauer watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and was impressed by its aesthetic and vision of a egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was the beginning of the internet and personal computing. The future of Star Trek could be viewed from the perspective of a more connected world, and the computer was an escape from the world as it is.

The Seneca: A Keyboard for $3,600$: The Case for Two Groups of Nested Keyboard nerds

The switches and stabilizers were developed by Norbauer & Co. and are exclusive to the company’s keyboards, which is just the Seneca for right now. The reason I wanted to test the keyboard was because of the interesting things on it. They are phenomenal.

The term “Endgame” is a running gag among keyboard enthusiasts. Endgame is when you finally dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keycaps, so you can stop noodling around with parts and get on with whatever it is you actually use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a few months later you see something shiny and start over.

What if you didn’t have to compromise? What if you had the time, patience, and money to make your own keyboard? From the cable to the switches and stabilizers is really what I mean.

If you are selling a keyboard for $3,600, you have narrowed your audience to two groups. You have to be able to convince the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s something about your keyboard they can’t get anywhere else. And you have to convince the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you’ve convinced the keyboard nerds and that this keyboard is worth half an entry-level Rolex.

They have been impressed, as a rule. Everyone likes the way it sounds and looks, but they are not as enthusiastic as they should be. It hasn’t ruined them for their Keychrons. People ask where the number pad is.

Norbauer Seneca: A $3,600 luxury capactive keyboard for the keyboard obsessed (Review: A press release from the Verge)

The typing angle of the Seneca is completely flat. There is a typing angle between 3 and 11 degrees on most mechanical keyboards. Ergonomically, flat (or even negative) is better. There’s an optional riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that gives it a three-degree typing angle, if you prefer. I put it backward and now all my other keyboards don’t feel right. This might be the Seneca’s biggest impact on my life going forward.

There are at least a few quirks. The Seneca’s custom cable uses USB-C on the computer end and a Lemo connector at the near end. If the Seneca is joining a rotation of keyboards on your desk it means you have to swap cables every time. On the one hand, if you’re buying a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard, are you really going to move it off your desk that much? On the other, if you care enough about keyboards to buy this one, you probably do have a lot of nice keyboards you want to rotate between. (Norbauer is working on a short Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, but that also wasn’t ready during the review period.)

The Edition Zero Senecas didn’t include hardware-based key remapping which is the biggest omission. Norbauer chose not to include remappability for simplicity when he commissioned the software nearly a decade ago. He deemed software remapping good enough for a keyboard with a standard layout that isn’t meant to be carried from computer to computer.

The unit I’ve been testing is from Edition Zero — the first production run — which includes 50 that were offered in a private sale last summer to a small group of previous Norbauer clients, as well as a few more for testing, certification, and review.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

The permanent: a $3,600 luxury capacitive keyboard for the keyboard obsessed (Norbauer Seneca review) — a massively heavy and unbelievably pleasant case

It is staggeringly heavy, ungodly expensive, and unbelievably pleasant to type on, in a way that maybe only diehard keyboard enthusiasts will fully appreciate.

For lack of a better word, it’s permanent. It’s almost seven pounds and looks like concrete or worn down stone. The case is made of milling aluminum, which has an oxidation finish that makes it feel very smooth. It is difficult to pick up; there is no place to put your fingers. It is supposed to stay at your desk.

The typing experience is sublime. The keys have a big tactile bump right at the top, a smooth downstroke, and a snappy upstroke. The ones on my review unit are medium weight, which are supposed to feel similar to 45g Topre; there are lighter and heavier options.

Source: Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

Silence-X or Raindrops? The Sound of the Penta-Like Sena on the PCB with Muted Switches

The switches are muted, not silenced; silicone rings on the slider soften the upstroke, and there’s a damper between the switch and PCB that quiets the downstroke and prevents coil crunch. I tried an old Silence-X ring, but it didn’t work with the switches.

The information page on the keyboard states that the sound of the sena is often likened to raindrops. It has a soft intentionally vintage-sounding thock without being obtrusively clacky.” Read that in whatever voice you’d like. For what it’s worth, Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, who did not read the info page but did listen to the typing test embedded below, also said it sounded like raindrops.