Introduction

It was nearly two years ago that an Indiegogo campaign began- one that completely missed my attention until three months after it was successfully funded and the campaign was closed. This marked the introduction of the ErgoDox EZ company to me, and I kept up with the campaign updates to see an astonishingly consistent delivery of the campaign goals and more. That was when I realized I simply had to know more about the company and the product, and here we are today. ErgoDox EZ is still an extremely small company- the CEO/co-founder personally handles customer support over email and video calls not because he can not afford dedicated support staff but because he prefers to. It is fitting then that the company exists for the sole purpose of manufacturing and selling a keyboard product most readers here may not even have heard of.


This is the ErgoDox EZ, or more specially the ErgoDox EZ Shine. The ErgoDox started, and remains, an open source keyboard project initiated by Dominic "Dox" Beauchamp to satisfy the need for a fully customizable, ergonomic, split keyboard (hence the name). It was met with great interest in the enthusiastic keyboard community in the early 2010s, and especially from writers and coders alike. Multiple years passed and the proof of concept was established, however it was not until the ErgoDox EZ that people could get their hands on a pre-assembled product without having to source individual parts as a kit and assemble it- yes, including soldering the components on to the PCB and programming the MCU- themselves. So let us clarify it here and then: the ErgoDox EZ is a pre-assembled keyboard concept that has been tested for years and is now available for a larger audience. The particular sample I have here, the Shine, is a special edition white with a strip of addressable RGB LEDs on each half for an underglow. So thanks a lot to ErgoDox EZ for providing the review sample, and let us begin with a look at the specifications in the table below.

Specifications