Somewhat recently, I was introduced to the concept of customisable mechanical keyboards. I do a lot of typing, mainly writing/story work, so the tool I use is quite important, I’ve just never given it much thought before.
My old keyboard was a Topmate K22, which is a pretty basic keyboard. I’ve recently been gifted a mechanical one that uses a Weikav Lucky65 V2 as a frame.
It turns out mechanical keyboards are pretty neat. Though they’re better than normal keyboards in almost every way, they also have their own, rather unique, problems.
In this article I will look at the Weikav Lucky65 V2 keyboard, the switch and keycaps selection used and a look at using VIA to configure the keyboard.
Mechanical Keyboards
Despite typing, writing and computers being rather important to me, my hobbies, and my social life, I never really looked much into keyboards. As long as I could see the symbols in the dark, it was quiet, and it wasn’t wireless, I honestly didn’t much mind the other factors. It could be bright pink for all I cared; but in all honesty that’d be pretty cool. If nothing else, your keyboard would be easy to identify as yours.
In retrospect though, now that I’ve recently been given a mechanical keyboard, it’s quite surprising what a difference it’s made.
I was introduced to the idea of a mechanical keyboard some two-ish years ago when my dad started to take an interest, and began to collect them. This was around the same time I half-heartedly considered upgrading my keyboard to a quieter one after the keys had lost the eponymous silent part of a silent keyboard.
He has some quite fancy mechanical keyboards, including one that’s two pieces, but is actually one keyboard split down the middle, and no numpad. It’s quite a strange one, you can read more about it in this article about the Lily58 R2G mechanical keyboard.
Anyway, when he first showed the idea to me, I was mildly interested, but if there’s one thing that mechanical keyboards are (in)famous for, it’s the noise. You may have noticed from the earlier criteria I listed, but I like my keyboards silent, so the noise factor was quite the turn-off, at least until I learned that it depended on which key switches you use.
The customisability was interesting to me, as were the macros, lights and multimedia functions, but they seemed more like gimmicks I’d use maybe two or three times before giving up or losing interest.
Cut to the 16th of January 2025, when dad showed me one of three (technically 1 of about 135~) components to a mechanical keyboard. The frame, a Weikav Lucky65 V2, made of aluminium and with several colours to choose from.
I was hesitant, I think rightfully so considering the price was a spicy £50, which is a not insignificant amount to drop on a keyboard in my eyes. My most recent keyboard was a Topmate K22, which goes for around £30, and had lasted for over three years, and all of my previous keyboards had been either cheaper or free hand-downs.
Eventually I decided to ‘bite the bullet’ as it were, and agreed to get one in purple. If I liked it, then I’d get a new quiet keyboard I can see when it’s dark and isn’t wireless. If I didn’t, dad got more mechanical keyboard bits to enjoy. Win/win!
Weikav Lucky65 V2 Keyboard Frame
When the Lucky65 arrived on the 21st, the first thing I noticed when unpacking it was the surprising heft it had. Reading it was 1200g, 1.2kg, was one thing, but in a 32 cm package it was genuinely surprising how dense it was at first.
Its weight, in addition to some very grippy rubber pads on the corners means that it doesn’t shift in the slightest when typing. So far I’ve only changed its position when I’ve changed how I’ve sat. I moved my K22 around every other day, so this is one of the more obvious benefits.
The second benefit of the Lucky65 was that, for once when ordering online, the colour matched what was in the picture! Which was a very pleasant surprise.
The Weikav Lucky65 V2 is also set at a permanent angle, roughly 15-20 degrees. For me, this is brilliant, I always had the stand up on my previous keyboards to give them a bit of tilt, but I’m also aware that some people either don’t like a tilted keyboard, or have ligament/tendon problems in their hands.
Typing at an angle other than flat increases the strain on the tendons and ligaments in your hand and wrist. While 15 degrees isn’t huge, it’s definitely at least worth taking note of.
The packing of the box it came in was very secure. A smooth-texture plastic bag around the keyboard, and quarter-inch thick foam with a thinner loose sheet placed on the top, over a card explaining the functions of the keyboard.
I’m used to companies filling out boxes with extra dunnage, like empty boxes or unusually large blocks of foam, to make the inside fit the dimensions of the box. To my surprise, the plain white box with no markings filling out the inside so it matched the dimensions wasn’t just padding material, but actually housed a tool needed for attaching and removing keys and keycaps, as well as a USB-C connection wire.
The function explanation card is quite thorough, with instructions in both English and Mandarin, though it does leave out a very crucial detail about accessing the F keys.
The Lucky65 doesn’t have a number pad or dedicated f-keys, and is missing a number of other function and punctuation keys. In order to use a f-key, such as f1, you need to hold down the Fn key, then press 1. This is pretty simple, but isn’t mentioned anywhere on the card.
What is mentioned however are commands such as Fn+F4 to directly open the calculator on windows machines. There is, however, a small problem in doing this. In order to press F4, we need to hold Fn and then press 4. But that’s only to press F4. The calculator command needs Fn and F4.
To do this, you need to press Fn+Ctrl. This turns all your number keys into f-keys, which means you can press Fn and F4, letting you bring up the calculator.
Again, this isn’t mentioned anywhere on the card or packing.
I don’t use the function keys particularly often, and I’m pretty sure that this is actually the first time I purposefully pressed them on this computer, but this feels like quite a big oversight. A lot of people who buy mechanical keyboards, especially proper weighty ones, are likely going to be using those keys a lot more than me. That’s not to mention the fact that getting certain symbols, like a hashtag, is potentially impossible if you use a British qwerty layout.
I’m getting ahead of myself though.
HMX KD200 Switches
When assembling a mechanical keyboard, there are three pieces you need. The frame, which is the Lucky65, the keys and then keycaps.
The keys in this instance are from HMX Switch, and are the KD200’s. The switches came in a nice little case that looks like a old style film canister. The switches installed into the keyboard ok, but there is a plastic membrane that the switch prongs needed to push through and a few of the prongs bend whilst doing this.
After a few minutes the switches were all installed.
I can say with absolute certainty that I’ve never felt smoother or nicer keypresses in my life. They’re very lightweight, with 45g of operating force and bottoming-out at 50g, give or take 5g both ways, and with a 22mm spring they barely move and I barely have to put any force on the keys to get them moving.
The sensitivity does come with a cost however, and it seems to be a clash of my normal typing style and the one needed for the keyboard.
When typing very rapidly with words that have two of the same letter after each other, like the words letter, need or sorry for example; I’ll often find that I’ve only got one of the duo, ending up with "leter", "ned" or "sory". I’m almost positive that it’s simply me not releasing the key properly after pressing it the first time. This is entirely user-error instead of any actual issues with the KD200’s though, but it’s something to note if you’re a reasonably fast or twitchy typer like me.
Other than that though, they’re a huge, huge improvement over the Topmate K22 keys. The K22 key switches had a weird kink to them where they had a small bit of give, before suddenly dropping all the way down, as well as a tendency to get a little bit stuck if pressed at an angle.
The KD200’s however, are smooth as butter through the entire press, and work perfectly fine no matter what angle the push comes from. There’s no difference in feedback, no differentiation in resistance force through the key press, and it’s one of the things you don’t immediately explicitly notice, but you certainly notice the effect. It makes a remarkable difference in a very positive way.
Setting Up
Setting up the keyboard itself was easy, just somewhat tedious, but if I didn’t have my dad walking me through it, I know for a fact I’d have been completely lost.
First, now that you have the keyboard and key switches assembled for the Weikav Lucky65, go to the Weikav website, find the software & firmware page, and find the VIA JSON File of your specific keyboard.
Second, using Chrome or Opera go to the amazing website https://usevia.app, and select "authorize device", then click the keyboard in the drop down menu. In this instance the Lucky65 V2.
Then you head to the design segment, it’ll have this little paintbrush as an icon, and select the “Load” in the “load draft definition”. This is where that JSON File comes in, you want to select that for the Loading.
Once all that’s sorted, go to the key tester section. It’ll have a little stethoscope icon.
You can then slap on the keycaps into their appropriate position on the board far easier than using the little diagram on the card it came with.
Pressing the keys on your keyboard will cause the matching keys to light a rather nice shade of purple, and once pressed it will be dyed a darker shade of purple.
In the image below I’ve pressed every key on the Lucky65, (you can press the windows key and not activate the windows menu by holding Alt at the same time),and I’m currently holding down the Q key.
Once all that is done, you then want to move to the configure tab on the far left.
This is where it can get complicated. If you didn’t think it was complicated so far, congratulations, you understand all this better than I do.
The configure tab lets you set-up all kinds of things, including see the layout of the keyboard on the screen match the layout of the keyboard on the desk. There’s one I’ve made ready usage of already though, Layers.
Layers are in the top left when you enter the configure tab, and, tl;dr, they allow you to pick and choose what Fn+[key] does.
This is the top-layer, layer 0:
Layer 1, the one underneath, looks a little different:
If I was to press Fn+B, nothing would happen. But I’m able to bind Fn+B to do anything from Caps Lock, volume up, adjust the RGB of the keyboard, or enable a macro. Right now I’ve customised my keyboard to have Fn+A set to print-screen, Fn+H to hashtag, Fn+PgUp to Home, and Fn+PgDn to End. As I use the keyboard I might add more.
Rebinding a key is quite simple. You just click on the key you want to rebind, then click on the vast selection beneath. Clicking on the bottom then the top doesn’t work unfortunately.
A Strange Problem
Beware though, some keys appear to have incorrect legends.
This seems like it might be an issue with my keyboard using the British qwerty layout on the computer itself, but probably being originally set-up with the american layout in the JSONn file.
My 2 key doesn’t print an @ like the image above says, but instead has speech quotes “, the opposite is true for the key marked with “ and ‘. It does give the apostrophe, but it gives an @, not speech quotes “.
This continues across the board, and the one labeled with a backslash and a vertical line is the one to give me a # and ~. This took me a few minutes to figure out in a notepad doc, just testing different combinations of buttons, because this confusion carried over to Usevia.app as well. Assigning a Fn+[key] with a hashtag, #, gave me a pound sign, £, instead. I can’t even put a vertical line on the Fn+J bind, because it gives me ~, so I’m literally unable to type some punctuation. Replacing Fn+J with ~ doesn’t work either, because that gives me ¬ for some reason.
This confuses me greatly, and I’m honestly not entirely sure what’s going on, but I’m sticking to the computer layout and JSON file confusing each other for now. I can always copy-paste from a google search if I really need the symbol, but they don’t come up often enough for me to warrant giving myself a headache trying to fix it.
Binding Macros with Usevia.app
Macros in VIA can be a bit temperamental, but they’re easy enough to set-up.
They’re stored in this menu, helpfully labelled Macros, but they don’t do anything yet. Assigning one of the fifteen macro options to your keyboard wouldn’t accomplish anything other than having a useless keybind.
First, you need to go to the little CD/Disk symbol just to the left.
Once you're in there, I’d highly recommend clicking the "</>" symbol to change the input mode.
Then you simply type the macro you want to execute when you press a key combination.
If I wanted a quick way to let my friends know that I’m heading to lunch, assuming I have friends, I can simply type in “Lunch!” (minus the quotes) into M0, hit save, then bind M0 to, say, Fn+B.
And now whenever I press Fn+B, my keyboard will immediately print out the term Lunch!
Backlight Problems
You can also customise the Backlights, in the little lightbulb, for a variety of effects from Heatmap to spiral, and you can save and load custom loadouts in the little floppy disc icon.
The majority of the backlight options work very well. Raindrops is distractingly chaotic, Breathing makes me immensely uncomfortable, Rainbow Beacon is nice to zone out to, and yet I’ll still forever keep my keyboard on a simple Solid Colour.
One problem I can remark on though, is that the heatmap typing is… a little broken.
Heatmap backlight works by identifying the key you just pressed, then lighting it and a small area around it up. A heatmap of your typing. And for the middle of the keyboard, this works more or less perfectly. And then you get to the edges…
Capslock lights up "[", which in turn does not light up Capslock when pressed, but ‘U’. This is a little strange on its own, But a ton of other keys have entire chains around the whole keyboard. Pressing Tab lights up Del, Fn is the up arrows, the down arrows does right ctrl, etc etc.
This problem also occurs with backlight settings like Splash, Multisplash and Solid Reactive Simple, etc etc.
Keycaps
Speaking of lights, the keycaps!
We used the side-printed keys from ACGAM, and the caps are quite different from what I was used to, having the symbols on the side facing the typer instead of on top. Despite the unorthodox placement, they work an absolute treat. The symbols are less obtrusive, but, surprisingly, they’re notably easier to see at a glance compared to the normal orientation.
Take that with a grain of salt. I’m neurodivergent so my brain processes information in a fundamentally different way to most people, so they might be just difficult for the "Normies" in comparison to the normal symbol position.
The texture of the plastic used for the caps is lovely too. It’s got enough grip to not let your hands slide across the board, but it's smooth enough that it doesn’t cling to your fingers on a keypress. It’s a really nice texture to type with.
Making the keycaps quieter was really simple as well, simply adding a small silicon washer on the underside around where it connected to the switches. The keys no-longer go clackity-click-clack, but now have a ‘creamy’ sound, as dad described it. Honestly I’m not sure if there’s a better descriptive word for it, creamy fits perfectly.
Once the silicon washer is added, make sure you give the key a good firm press down. You should hear and feel a slight chunk of the washer sliding into place. If you don’t make sure they’re pressed all the way down, then the keys are as loud as before.
For some reason the "=" key is notably louder than the others, but there’s always one odd-one out in everything. I’m just assuming that the equals is the odd-one this time.
Really the only gripe I have is that the caps I have are for ANSII (or American) qwerty instead of the ISO version. Having a key labeled 2 and @ give 2 and “ is… a little confusing, I’ll be honest.
Overall Performance
As for gaming, I gave it a quick test in Warframe: 1999, because my love-hate relationship with grindy MMO’s is still definitely very healthy. Watch me mentioning 1999 immediately date this post in a few years time.
Strangely enough, the keyboard gave the game a smoother feeling. I play warframe with ability-centric frames, Gara, Banshee, Styanax etc, so I’m having to repeatedly reach for 1-4 very consistently, as well as the usual ctrl, shift space and alt of movement in that game.
The keyboard can handle multiple simultaneous button presses very well, and I’ve yet to have any confusion for the in-game movement. The same problem with the double-letter words appears here too. Sometimes double-jumping is just a normal jump because I pressed space too quickly, but again, that feels more like user error.
I can’t emphasise how weird it felt to play warframe “smoothly” though. Having a nice keyboard really makes the world of difference in how a game feels, and, despite previously being a game development student in college, that definitely surprised me. Styanax (the character in Warframe) went from being a clunky powerhouse to an incredibly smooth and easy to control Weapon of Mass Destruction.
I did have to take some time to get used to the layout of the keyboard initially though. The backspace was a little shorter, the left shift was a little longer, the enter key was a different shape, the keys were a different depth, so I'm still getting used to it. Lots of small things that compounded to make typing on this keyboard notably different from other keyboard layouts.
I used https://monkeytype.com to practice and familiarise myself with the layout of the normal alphabet, backspace and the different length space bar. I’m back up to my average of 80 words per minute and after using it for a few days, and writing out both this and some of a new chapter in my current story, I can confidently say that it’s a very good keyboard.
Overall, I’d give it an 8/10.
Functionally flawless and wonderful to type with, as long as you ignore whatever is up with the mislabeled keys.
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