Wind Sin65: Packaging and Accessories

Wind Studio can be considered as a small boutique keyboard brand compared to the vast majority of other keyboard makers we have covered on TechPowerUp to date. As such, I was not surprised to see a large, thick cardboard box custom made for the Sin65. In fact, even the company logo has been customized to include the Sin from Sin65 in it in addition to the lettering in the middle. That same sticker extends around the side and on to the back where you get confirmation of the exact type of kit you ordered—anodized orange for this sample. The lid can be removed to access the contents inside beginning with a thick foam piece for added protection to the accessory box underneath. There is also a simple installation document which basically leads you to this page providing more details on how to put the kit together.


There is a lot going on here with individually wrapped elements you need to put together into the kit. These come nicely protected and labeled to help avoid confusion, which is handy since newcomers to keyboards may otherwise be overwhelmed by the similar looking items. For example, here we have two pieces of battery foam, 1 mm Poron foam +2 mm hot swap foam + 3.5 (and an optional 5) mm poron foam + IXPE sheets, a polycarbonate plate as well as an aluminium plate.


We then get to the PCB which is either wired (soldered only), wired + hot swap, or wired/Bluetooth + hot swap depending on which option you went for. I have the wired + hot swap version here characterized by the Gateron switch sockets pre-installed. No matter which version you go with, the PCB will be adorned in maths on the front because, if you didn't guess it by now, the Sin in Sin65 is short for Sine and we will see the use of sin(x) in the case design too. Powering this PCB is an ST Microelectronics STM32F103C8 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 USB microcontroller with 64 KB of onboard memory and a relatively faster, more powerful processor compared to what's usually seen on keyboards. The best part is this MCU has open-source firmware support with QMK so you can expect to see VIA/VIAL support for software customization. The other two PCBs may well have a different controller as I know the wireless one at least relies on a Chinese driver which also feels quite competently made. The various components are soldered neatly on this multi-layer PCB as expected.


The accessory box also provides a bunch of similarly packed and labeled screws as well as an L-shaped Allen key which came in its own little pouch. Wind Studio also sent over a set of screw-in stabilizers to use but you are otherwise expected to provide your own stabilizers here—I fully expect anyone looking at this kit to already know exactly which stabilizers they want to use as well as likely manually lubing them too.


The bottom layer has even more foam and here we see the case itself in one final wrap. Needless to say that Wind Studio is not going cheap with packing materials here and you will have a pristine unboxing experience.