Mountain DisplayPad: Closer Examination

A lot of what I said about the Mountain MacroPad also applies to the DisplayPad—especially when it concerns the ABS plastic chassis itself. We still get the same midnight black brushed aluminium frame too and the difference here comes in the form of 12 display keys in two rows of six, as opposed to simpler mechanical switches. Mountain is using 104 x 104 pixel LCD displays here, making these sharper than the ones we saw on the Everest Max number pad. These have transparent covers on top and you can click the buttons for ~1.5 mm travel with a light tactile feedback. Inside is an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller, as with the MacroPad, to allow for the unit to be independently operational. The DisplayPad also requires a wired connection to an available USB 2.0 (or newer) port on your PC.


Installing the DisplayPad is analogous to the MacroPad in that you simply push the unit into the provided base and connect the cable on the back. This means that Mountain allows users to have the DisplayPad and/or MacroPad also be of interest to content creators who use, for example, a gaming console as their primary means of content delivery, whereby they would not necessarily have a standalone keyboard.


TechPowerUp however, is primarily a PC-centric website and Mountain makes their peripherals with our community in mind. They would like nothing better than to have you in the Mountain product ecosystem that now encompasses keyboards, mice, desk pads, and now two keypads too. I mentioned previously how I would have liked to see Mountain find a way to get these units more compatible with the Everest 60, given the Everest Core/Max have their own extra keys and display units already, but either way you can see above how the MacroPad and DisplayPad can clip into the Everest Core TKL unit easily. The extra length of these units now makes more sense since they need to accommodate the cutout in the keyboard case for the USB hub ports that now get blocked. This is another place where my imagination would like to find a way to get the units to dock into the USB ports as opposed to still needing their own separate power and data connection, however my realistic brain knows that would be extremely hard to engineer in this form factor. If you have the Everest Max then you can still use one of these keypads along with the media dock, or have both be separate units on your desk. Either way you will need a minimum of two cables—one each for the keyboard and a keypad—with this particular combination necessitating three USB cables and available ports on your PC. I do like the natural elevation of these modules when installed on the keyboard, and the full set would not look out of place in a futuristic sci-fi movie scene.