Welcome.

Included Items

• 1 Starboard keyboard • 1 USB-C to USB A cable • 1 USB A to USB-C adapter

Description

The Starboard keyboard was designed for stenography. It features: • 26 closely-positioned keys with slight staggering to match your different finger lengths • A tilted layout so your wrists remain straight even for complex chords • A 1/4"-20 nut allowing you to easily attach it to a standard tripod • Kailh Choc pink keyswitches • Choc hot-swap sockets • 16 MB of memory • Ability to flash custom firmware if you want to modify the layout • USB-C connection The Starboard is a feature-rich, ergonomic keyboard designed for stenography. The ergonomic features include slightly staggered columns to account for your fingers being different lengths, thumb clusters where your thumbs naturally rest, tilting each hand's key cluster inward 30 degrees. Overall, this means you can maintain straight wrists even for complex chords and the keys are within easy reach. If you prefer your keyboard on a tripod rather than a desk, you're in luck! The Starboard is built with a 1/4"-20 nut embedded in it, so you can easily attach it to a standard tripod; just screw it onto your tripod and you're good to go. If you use the Starboard on a desk, it sits flat even with the nut embedded in it; you may want to place a mousepad under it though to keep it from sliding. If you choose to customize your Starboard, you have quite a bit of freedom. The keyboard comes with Choc hot-swap sockets, so you can replace the Kailh Choc pink keyswitches with any other Choc keyswitch (but not MX style switches). You can also use QMK or similar software to flash your own firmware if you want to add/modify layers; the two leftmost keys don't do anything in the default stenography layer, so you could use them to switch to other layers if you like. To flash new firmware, plug in the keyboard to the computer, hold down the BOOT button on the microcontroller, press and release the RST button, and finally release the BOOT button. Your computer should then recognize the microcontroller as external storage and you can copy your firmware file onto it. The keyboard is shipped configured for stenography, so you'll need to configure stenography software such as Plover to read the keyboard's output and translate it to the correct words. Alternatively, you could setup embedded stenography so that the microcontroller on the Starboard translates your strokes into the words in your stenography dictionary and then sends those to your computer. With embedded stenography, you can plug your keyboard into any computer and immediately start writing without any additional setup. The Starboard microcontroller has 16 MB of memory to accommodate for embedded stenography, but you'll have to set up embedded stenography yourself if you choose to do use it. In short, the Starboard keyboard is a great choice for anyone looking for a stenography keyboard. It's affordable, comfortable, and has many of the features you might want in a stenography keyboard. If there's a feature not included that you want, please contact us and let us know! Other people would probably also want that feature, and we're happy to evaluate whether we could add it to the keyboard.