Wooting 80HE - Ergonomics and feet

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Once you start to feel strain on your tendons while typing or gaming, it’s telling you to take a break, your muscles are tired, so don’t overuse them. By reducing the strain, you can go on for longer before muscle fatigue kicks in.

We follow these guidelines to minimize the strain on your hands, so they won’t fatigue as fast.

1. Front side height, including OEM keycaps, no higher than 30mm
2. Total height as low as possible
3. The least amount of degrees angle.

These three factors influence each other and are user-dependent.

Hand sizes

When you have larger hands or longer fingers, it’s generally easier to reach far-reaching keys and you can easily use a lower angle. If you have small hands or shorter fingers, this becomes a lot more challenging, so you’d want to use a larger angle.

This is why the 80He has exchangeable silicone feet for different degree angles that can snap onto the bottom.

• The standard angle with flat feet is 2.8 degrees for large-sized hands.
• The second angle with contoured feet is 6 degrees for medium-sized hands
• The third angle with contoured feet is 10 degrees for smaller-sized hands

Most people will opt for 6 degrees, as it strikes a good middle ground for all hand sizes. If you end up needing a wrist rest, then you should use the lowest angle possible.

Design

The 80HE was a bit more challenging, we had to make space for:

• The daughterboard
• Gasket mount

We went as far as making a prototype of 0 degrees under the 30mm, but at 0 degrees, you need to go lower, which was physically not possible.

Therefore the final version has 2.8 degrees with flat feet and a total front height of 28.4mm with OEM keycaps, and 19.4mm without keycaps. If you use one of the larger angled feet, it decreases the front height slightly more.

Habit

Whenever you use a new keyboard, it’s going to feel different. It can be unpleasant to break habits and adjust your muscle memory, but don't let this shy you away from someting different. Give it time, your hands and brains quickly adjust, then ask yourself if it's an overall improvement.

That it!

<3Calder

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