Last Saturday, I attended Mechanicon in Frankfurt. It was an event related to mechanical keyboards, gathering over 600 visitors, which made it the biggest event of its kind in Europe.
Why
I started thinking of making or purchasing a mechanical keyboard a long time ago. And half a year ago I finally built my own.
But having one does not mean that is the end of the story. There are so many different layouts, options, and ideas within keyboard communities that trying them all on my own would take me years. So, I decided that it would be easier to attend a gathering of mechanical keyboard users/nerds and check what they had made.
I was told by a few people that I should go to Frankfurt for Mechanicon. So I did.
My keyboards
I have decided to take two of my mechanical keyboards with me:
- Alicja
- Alpha60
The first one is my daily keyboard — the one with a slightly modified Adelheid layout, hand-wired, with two encoders. I described it in one of my older blog posts.
The second one is a typical 60% model, but with the keys set in alphabetical order. So, “End” comes after “E” and before the “Esc” key.
I bought it as a broken one (for parts, as I only needed one key). My daughter wanted to play with the keycaps and asked if she could put them in the alphabetical order. I agreed and later joked that it can be made into a working keyboard.
Months passed and I found time for it a week before Mechanicon. I removed the PCB and wired the entire keyboard by hand. As with Alicja, I used the Ultimate Pico as the microcontroller with QMK firmware.
Mechanicon 2025
In the morning, I packed both my keyboards into my backpack and went for a walk. After having breakfast on the way (shakshouka and coffee), I arrived about an hour too early.
I took a table, placed both keyboards on display with A4 information sheets, and went to see who was already there.
I spoke with Cherry MX folks, saw their collection of industrial keyboards and discussed the 27.5 kg monster they had on their stand. There was a small album with pictures showing the build process. Nice stuff.
Khor had cables of many kinds and sold several other accessories. They made the official badge for Mechanicon and for some past events.
Cerakey had keyboards with ceramic keycaps and ceramic wrist pads.
As more and more people were arriving, I went back to the keyboard showcase room to see what others had brought.
Keyboards
Put a few hundred mechanical keyboard nerds in one room and you will not know where to look. There were so many different layouts, designs, accessories, cases…
Alice
As my daily keyboard is based on a variant of TGR Alice I looked especially for any similar models. There were a few Alice ones, some Arisu variants and some in a similar shape. No one had an Adelheid or Red Herring based keyboard.
Split and minimalistic ones
Nowadays, when you do a web search for an ergonomic keyboard, you mostly get links to split or minimalistic keyboards. Just the names change from year to year. Or the amount of keys. Or the way they connect to each other.
The same was here: flat keyboards or ones with different types of mounts allowing the keyboard to be set at any angle. There were also vertical split keyboards. Some even had a trackball, but it did not look ergonomic to me.
PC105 family
As usual, there was a lot of “standard” keyboards and their variants. From normal PC105 ones to 60% ones with everything around them: 60%, 65%, TKL, ones with an extra row above function keys, ones with extra columns on the left, right, and so on.
Boring ones ;D
Funny entries
The person next to me had a lamp in a shape of a key — a nice-looking one.
Someone prepared keyboard from chocolate. At first, I thought that it was a case and keycaps made to look edible, but an hour later I saw a knife next to it and part of the keyboard had already been eaten. This was a good chocolate mix.
Freebies
There was a place called “PCB Exchange” where anyone could drop unneeded items for others to take. I looked at the options and took a Hummingbird one. Later, I realised that it requires different type of switch to what I have…
At one stand, there was a “Free Shit” box. I spoke with the owner and got a bag with one hundred used switches and another with an interesting keycaps set.
On one stand, we were talking about hand wiring, and I was shown a tool: a plate fork. It was a tool I did not know, yet it is so useful! In short, it is a tool to insert between a switch and a keycap to be able to take the keycap out without moving the switch. This is very useful when your switches are only held in the keyboard by luck.
At some stands there was an opportunity to take some random switches. I joked that it may be possible to make a keyboard where every switch is of a different kind. Maybe one day, just for fun.
As I mentioned used keycaps at some stand, I was given a tool to open switches for maintenance. Another thing I did not expect to ever need.
Summary
Going to Mechanicon was a very good decision. I particularly enjoyed the look on the faces of people when they saw my hand-wired keyboard! Or when they tried to enter their name on a 60% keyboard with alphabetical order :D
I have several ideas for my next keyboard project. Perhaps I will go with Amoeba mini-PCBs (there are many versions of them in repository forks). I need to look into designing a 3D model for an encoder knob, as I saw several interesting designs during the event. And I need to design a case so the keyboard will not be so floppy.
There was also an idea of creating a small keyboard where every switch will be a different one.
You can see more photos in my Mechanicon 2025 album.