Ming-Gih Lam's Red Herring Solenoid Edition Mechanical Keyboard Offers Toggleable Clicky Feedback
Built using silent keyswitches, this eye-catching ergonomic keyboard packs a solenoid to provide the clacks only when you want them.
Keyboard enthusiast Ming-Gih Lam has built a clicky keyboard with a difference: It uses silent keyswitches, but a toggleable solenoid to provide an optional clack with every keystroke.
Lam's latest creation is based on the Red Herring, a 75 percent ortholinear ergonomic keyboard inspired by the Arisu layout. As well as its split keyboard keys, the design integrates a rotary encoder knob, a small OLED display, and a window to show off the "unique herringbone pattern" to the design's diodes.
The latest Red Herring remix, though, is truly something special. Brought to our attention by Adafruit, the Red Herring Solenoid Edition aims to provide configurable clacky feedback — by tying a physical solenoid to each key press.
The new version of the board is built using Silent Alpaca keyswitches, which makes it extremely quiet in use. When enabled, however, a solenoid built onto the board activates every time a key is pressed — providing a highly-audible and satisfying click as confirmation.
As with its predecessor, the Red Herring Solenoid Edition is open hardware: KiCad design files, firmware, and vectors for the acrylic sheets are all available on the project's GitHub repository under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.