Gadgetory

Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for sixteen point eight million color perky backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more do so I don't know what was funnier about the cherry factory tour the fact that we showed up in lederhosen or the fact that they had preemptively arranged for two of their of the of the women in their marketing department to show up in dirndl in dirndl it was during I'm probably pronouncing that wrong but dirndl absolutely fantastic so they were they were really good sports about the whole thing I'm sure it was harder to walk around their workplace dressed like that than it was for us as strangers to people would recognize them and they're walking around like heels and dirndl yeah at the office and then there with these two random dudes who have like very low quality in some cases ripping all over the place later hoes and oh oh man yeah my boxers were totally showing oh definitely by the end of the day so the first step in the completely unexpected like I mean everything about these just felt over-engineered but we got to see the acoustic chamber that they use in order to validate not only the loudness of products but also the sound signature of products which was insane and just to make sure that it's super accurate they have this this very targeted microphone inside and foot and a half-ish thick padding on the outside with this double door system that he had to climb into well I looked at it I went well the microphones next to the switch in this case it was it was an MX RGB blue switch and I was like well okay but how do you actually press the button while having the door closed so not being a German engineer he assumed that you climb inside and press it manually yourself every single time turns out that wasn't the answer they actually have a mechanical finger that presses the switch over and over again for for for validation but hey whatever my solution would have worked to a technical yet so it's not just for validating that as they make running changes and improvements to Cherry MX that the sound signature stays the same but they do use it for that it's also for certifying keyboards to be low noise enough to to qualify for Blue Angel certification which is like a German government thing where if you want to sell something to the German government it has to pass the Blue Angels sort of so if the question was who cares if you have a 20 decibel noise floor acoustic chamber for keyboards the answer is someone the next stop in the tour was probably my my favorite part the environmental chamber so they have this whole hallway of machines that essentially torture test keyboards from really torture tests they've had a new product in one of them that was going through a cycle of temperature and humidity changes just to validate that in storage it wouldn't be broken by any of four mentioned temperatures and and conditions and so these things are capable of going anywhere from minus 40 all the way up to plus a hundred and eighty degrees so why would that ever matter apparently see Freight is a big deal because if you're if your car or container is at the top of the ship and it's under the Sun for a very long time that that inner area within the metal is going to get really hot kinds of things you don't think of and then the the chambers can also handle anywhere from 10 percent relative humidity all the way up to 98 percent relative humidity so of course they they loaded one up at minus 25 degrees through one of their one of the testers that they use to validate their 50 million keystroke cycles which doesn't just kind of tap it it hammers pretty hard hammers pretty hard and then they cranked up the humidity in it so we could get this awesome footage of one of their testers running on what switches were they were the MX blacks I think so I think they were MX blacks of just this thing being hammered at in the frost and the cold absolutely saying the craziest machine in my opinion was the temperature shock machine so it goes from I believe it was 70 degrees the test that they were running it could be more dressing this but the test that they're running at the point in time was 70 degrees Celsius in the chamber up top and then there would be an elevator that took five seconds which would bring it down into a separate chamber down below which was negative 20 degrees and it had to be able to not like crack and yeah not have the solder just yeah fail just completely live up which is pretty intense actually so in the next room we found most expensive piece of equipment on this entire trip that I almost broke it has a joystick and he went a little bit arcade machine on it but it was I was driving that thing so if you've ever seen like a really big warehouse and you see that crane that's on the big rail the top that can move pretty much wherever it wants basically like that pretty much what it was but much faster when you when you really go on a reef on the joystick yeah so it's it's just an actuation point but you can program on the computer how you want it to move so you can check out different batches of switches compared against each other so they'd go through the environmental testing that we'd seen earlier or it would be say something that had just been pressed 50 million times versus something that hadn't or anything that you want to compare and you test a batch of switches and the idea is that you'd look at the exact force required to press it down and then pull it back up and then you'd also be looking at where the actuation point was for the switch and the idea is that you'd want to see as much consistency as possible within a batch and then as much consistency as possible after 50 million key so after 50 million keystrokes it should have either not gotten that much worse or gotten better and the funny thing about Cherry is that they're whole well our key switches are validated for 50 million thing is based on this whereas I don't think we really have any assurance of what up to let's say for example 60 million keystrokes meems right does that mean it performs the same or better or it still actually functions at all and sherry actually has testing up to a hundred million they just want to show us those numbers not show us those numbers I think they're not quite as perfect anymore though why not so the switch we saw on the last piece had a clear housing so we can tell it's an MX RGB so that's from the Corsairs corsair gaming RGB line of keyboards but one of the coolest thing about the RGB keyboards is actually that the way the LEDs are embedded in the PCB instead of in the housing for the key switch makes them less prone to failure due to ESD but of course there are other electrostatic discharge concerns as well so this was a pretty cool piece of scientific equipment once two eight eight thousand volts oh my fault so many volts so he would he would charge up a metal plate that was on the table and then make sure very confidently make sure that there was no electrostatic charge going from the table up through the keyboard so he was just typing on it and the keyboard has to operate aside from not zapping the person who's using operate flawlessly so he's using the keyboard while charging the tape with the metal table with eight thousand volts and then he would take the eight thousand volt conductor and put it right on the keyboard and have to be able to continue using the keyboard with no faults no glove or anything just using the keyboard well okay they did say that even though it's quite painful it's not gonna you're not gonna be see very low amperage very low current it's not gonna really hurt anybody although I asked actually I don't know if you were there first yeah I asked him do you ever like sneak up behind anyone and give them the eight thousand yeah so chary takes keyboards very seriously but they can still have some fun yeah fairly so we got to see Jerry's first mechanical keyboards for this hole made with m8 switches you what Nate Oh anyways it was designed so that when making a newspaper instead of individually placing each one of the letters onto this giant grid so they could mass print newspaper you just typed it up you could type it it was revolutionary bizarro land keyboard ever was sold weirdest keep all the ghosts witches go that way go this way go possibly both ways and apparently spacebar stabilizers spacebar stabilizers didn't really seem to be a thing I don't know if those maybe were in there at the beginning and they were taken out fell out they were definitely not a thing when I was trying it that was it was really heavy too yes fullmetal construction on the whole thing so with that with the original keyboard out of the way we asked very very nicely if we would be allowed into the Cherry MX production area and they were very kind about saying no yeah they wanted to protect their trade secrets you know all the improvements that they've made to Cherry MX key switches over the over the years that have been not quite copied correctly by anyone who might be I need to copy the design they didn't want anyone to look at that so uh yeah yeah anyway so we were able to make a compromise of being able to check out the actual keyboard yeah so first we got gear DUP this is my first time wearing an ESD lab coat and electrostatic sandals yeah yeah so you take this little electrostatic strap and put it under your under your shoe and then into your sock or in Lance's case under your I prefer to call them electrostatic sandals but sure whatever whatever you want to call it and then this was really cool now Jerry was telling us this production line is actually 20 years old yeah so this is far from the state of the art that we might find in some of the top-secret areas so it starts with the crazy robot arm and I mean I was blown away when he told me this line is 20 years old yeah and is like nothing to do with the advanced nough some of the other more top-secret lines because this arm like picks up the keyboards top half bottom half puts them on the line and then it all scooches to the right to the right to the red oh no anyways these ones it didn't it didn't require individual key cap placement so we didn't get to see some of the stations running yeah he said it was a lot cooler earlier in the day but these this is like a special order for the German government so all the key caps were sort of preassembled so it's gift a lot of the stations but what's cool is that the station's automatically know if a step doesn't need to be done automation and they just don't do it yep so it went through and the the next stage actually that we did get to see was it testing all the switches so this giant machine that was pre aligned for every single one of the key caps would go down and press every single button just to make sure it worked and I didn't quite believe it when sherry told us at first that every single product was a hundred percent tested because I kind of went really that's too much man but they are and we even saw a keyboard fail yeah yeah we got to see one fail so the next station which was the laser engraving station I was so cool that which was like the coolest thing ever like did you two individual lasers going insanely fast although apparently slow because apparently it's a ten-year-old laser engraver and is much slower than all their other ones but seemed really fast to me would go through and engrave all the key caps unless it failed so when we saw that one going through production fail it skipped the the laser engraving station there was a big red light that went off very serious business someone ran over and pulled it off the line inspected it manually noticed that apparently the Machine told them the spacebar failed so they found that it was the stabilizing wire below the spacebar which was actually not aligned properly so he aligned it properly manually put it back at the beginning of the assembly process and it went through all the testing again when it passed then it got laser engraved and then it went to packaging very cool I mean I think the thing that stood out most to me about the entire cherry tour was the obsessive attention to detail and quality testing validation for secondary validation for something that I just completely took for granted yeah until I saw what goes into the amount of science the amount of everything that goes into these little tiny switches so I guess I guess that's pretty much it I huge thanks to cherry for letting us really take a look under the kimono so to speak of their manufacturing process thanks to you guys for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting us know would you like to see more of this kind of behind the scenes Factory and end product validation coverage from us and please let us know because otherwise we don't know what you want to see guys check out the video description for link to buy a cool t-shirt like the ones I normally wear you can also give us a monthly contribution or change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code whenever you buy keyboards or whatever else it is you buy thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe thanks a lot