After more than two weeks of hard work the 5 Shortcut giveaways have been built and shipped!
To be honest, building this 5 prototypes has been an intense experience. Even though we were going to build 5 prototypes like the one we announced in the website, we ended up doing a few changes:
- Modified the internal structure and total dimensions to make it more robust
- Resized the adjustable columns for functional and aesthetic purposes
- Created new thumb cluster with two 4 way switches and a thumb cluster cover
- Created a new wrist rest
The original prototype was fully designed by me (I’m not a skilled designer at all), what meant that many of the new upgrades required a ton of testing before implementation. Our assembly process went from being a mess to pretty good. We basically learnt how to design and build them better while doing.
The main issue was that this was the first time I built hardware and we didn’t had a proper specification sheet nor process hierarchy, something that is absolutely basic for any hardware project.
The difference in assembly time from the first to the last prototype was 4 extra hours and we ended up doing 6 prototypes instead of 5 because the first one wasn’t good enough. We paid the price of being inexperienced but learnt a ton and had fun!
