Gadgetory

everybody i'm steve from gamers accessed on net we're here at PAX East 2016 and i'm joined by you josh from logitech and ken from right brain electronics who worked together on this great wall of logitech G keyboards behind me but before we get to that all this coverage brought to you by cyberpowerpc who are awarded the reader's choice for best desktops at pc magazine so you Josh let's start with you you can't with this idea six months ago as I did yeah six months ago so basically we launched our GA 10 actually this is before we launched our g 8 10 which is our new RGB mechanical keyboard said all right it's got 16.8 million colors amador coming nerd you know I grew up playing pacman space invaders asteroids I'm like how cool would it be if we built a huge wall out of our keyboards and we like program to video game on and I like brought Wendy and Brent some of the other folks in I said what do you think and they looked at me like I was insane and so luckily that weekend Wendy ended up going to a show like a maker faire and she meant Kent she's like really friends with and she knows he works at this company called right brain and they help people with crazy dreams make it awesome it gets it yeah the crazier the better so that's that's kind of how we got started and we brought Ken and we said Kent what do you think so so what were some of the things that your team did on this so basically we took each of these keyboards we knew is going to be 160 of them low resolution you know it's not supposed to be a display right so basically we made it work with low resolution but we H laser etched each key so that lets more light out so that the brain sort of sees the negative space and fills it in and it was just really a collaborative team effort the guys that logitech have been great obviously you're just as the visionary I mean really a little little screw loose right but it's amazing when a team comes together in a short amount of time to do something this big you know is awesome think about it basically all we did is it's the exact it's a standard keyboard so one we we're actually selling it here at the show floor all we did is replace the key caps and basically just think we're just using every single key as if it's a pixel I'm just lighting the pixels as if it was a you know ginormous you know monitor so right so what are what was one of the main challenges you face on the software side for this so basically we tried a lot of off-the-shelf software that's done to basically map video to LEDs but this is 18,400 LEDs and they're not regularly in space they're not a rectilinear you know x y and so basically we have to map the video do these these irregular pixels and it brought off-the-shelf standard you know software to its knees I mean you load the program you wait a few minutes for the for the pile to load and then it was like six seven frames per second it just was not wasn't good so we just had to write our own software and that was really the biggest piece biggest challenge right so very cool logitech G keyboard here at PAX East 2016 if you want to check it out at the Logitech booth sort of in the middle of the show and as always thank you for watching links in the description below for more information on this some photos things like that and thank you guys for joining me it's Steve will see you all next time