About Us

Humble Beginnings

We started experimenting with the idea of making stuff around 2019 just before Covid hit the world. Having studied Biophysics and spending quite a lot of time in the lab, gave us a fair amount of tinkering experience that transferred into our hobby life.

Also 3D printers were a big thing then and we also wanted to be part of the maker world. So we ordered everything we needed to build a BLV mgn cube and tinkered until the tinkering almost drove us mad. The hobby was the 3D printer, not the making of cool stuff - Well, except that huge thing into which half of one of us fits into :D

You can see that the printer was not really printing. The cheap parts were just too crooked to align properly. In any case, we dropped the printer and now it sits in the corner of shame in the basement.

First Keyboards

During our Master Thesis, we programmed quite a lot. And one of us had a lot of issues with his right shoulder and wrists when using his original large keyboard. After some research the idea was born to switch to a 60% keyboard because it would make mouse movement easier and the hands would have to travel less across the keyboard as well (at least kind of).

Ordering an assembly kit from China and running it for quite some time until an electric discharge killed it due to bad (or no) shielding was a rather disappointing experience. At that point we also learned about the Dactyl project and also found an Anycubic SLA printer for cheap on eBay.

Starting to use SLA we made our first models and had a lot of fun with cleaning the mess of the printer (again...). You can see one of us in the winter cleaning the isopropyl alcohol from the sediment because money was tight at that time.

What We Type On

After quite some adventure into the vast keyboard and into the 3D printing space, we noticed that we want to settle for split keyboards, that are small and we can carry around.

Our SLA printer gave out because the Polarisator peeled off and replacing it resulted in unsatisfactory printing results. Therefore, a new printer was needed.

And luckily the Prusa MK4 came out. - Which we directly bought, assembled and started having a blast with actually printing, instead of fixing printers! With this we took on the challenge to build a Chocofi and modify the PCB to work with transistor switches for OLEDs and RGB (using ZMK). You can see our daily driver in the images which enabled us to finally type comfortably again.

The Assembly Line

You can see one of us plus a lovely wife assembling a few split keyboards that we sold of privately as we had PCBs laying around from our own builds. With the builds along the way there was always some features that we wanted missing. Either only one firmware choice or a nice layout but no encoders and so on.

During this journey, we noticed how hard it is to really build a reliable and reasonably priced keyboard. Sourcing, designing the PCBs, printing, assembling, testing and even the knowledge that one needs ranging from electronics to programming. While you learn a lot, it is still a lot of time and effort to work through. And this is how Kamo Keyboards (Kamo = Duck) was born.

Our goal is to provide everyone with a split keyboard which reliably works, has a fair price and a is a overall good product. If you have cool projects to do and have no time on your hands to go through the hassle, then we want to be there.

The Team

Here are we. The three of us met in university over 10 years ago when we studied Biophysics. Since then we went through many hardships and projects together. But no matter the hardship, we always made it through and had a blast (at least at the end when we succeeded (or failed)).

It is always about the people who make life enjoyable as they are the ones whom you challenge life with. With this team we feel that anything can come at us! But it is of course not always about projects and working. You can see us here sharing some dear memories on our vaccations, either when we go sailing and visited Japan.