GRAM V2 Buttons: A Year in the Making

Howdy folks, Grammy here! I know Bruises normally does the blog posts, but I thought I'd give you a bit of insight into the design journey of our newest release, the GRAM Choc Buttons. If you've been in our Discord server, you know we've been teasing these for months, but the journey started way before that, and before either of us even thought about turning this into a business.

 

March 2023 - GRAM Rev.1 MX Buttons:

When we first started making rectangles, the OFOF1 was the king of DIY, Open Source options. My biggest complaint was the buttons that came printable in the repository. They were difficult to assemble, loose, and generic in shape. I wanted something a bit more tailored; in fact, my first 3D modeling project EVER was redesigning these buttons to include a traditional MX mount and a concave surface. These turned out to be a hit, and versions of these lasted on all of our Open Frame1 case designs for the first 3 drops.

 

April 2023 - GRAM Choc Buttons v0.1a:

When developing our first prototype of what would eventually become the GRAM Slim, our flagship model, We experimented with using 20.64mm buttons, similar to Frame1 and OFOF1. These were stable and extremely low profile, but we found they looked a little anemic for such a large controller. We needed something more aggressive, something more imposing.

 

May 2023 - GRAM Choc Buttons v1.0:

The first official choc button release, used on our original Tsunami and Mainframe drops, were bigger, thicker, and more square than any button we designed before. Designed with an aesthetics-first mentality, we ditched the idea of concave buttons in favor of a completely flat puck, which lent an extremely minimal, borderline-brutalist look to our first official SLIM drops. It was around this time that we started exploring the idea of mass production, but these buttons wouldn't do the trick. They were still thin and we got dozens of tickets saying they were loose, and we still had issues with the ergonomics of the design. So we went back to work.

 

July 2023 - GRAM Choc Buttons v1.6:

We finally had an option that was the best of both worlds. By slightly thickening the top of the button and dropping the bottom rim so it lays nearly flush with the board when fully depressed, we created a versatile button set that feels much more integrated with the controller, rather than sitting on top of it. The interfacing pegs were also slightly oversized, leading to a much tighter fit. As rectangles take significantly more abuse than standard keyboards, we decided to keep this as we looked into a new manufacturing process: Injection Molding.

 

 January 2024 - GRAM Choc Buttons V2:

Up to this point we had done SLA resin 3D printing for all of our button models. Resin printing gives a great, high-detail print, but they are dimensionally imperfect, leading to some buttons being loose, some being over- or under-sized, and surface finish imperfections. We knew we would eventually have to do injection molding, but the costs associated with it were a bit intimidating as we were starting out.

With the success of the initial GRAM SLIM drop, we realized there was a real opportunity to bring awesome shit to people who really loved our work, and we realized the investment would be worth it. We ordered the steel molds to be made, and we started doing countless rounds of QA to make sure the fit, finish, and precision was to our standards.

Now that brings us to today.

Thanks to your support, we are able to supply the highest-quality choc buttons on the market. Soft matte textured PBT, hyper-modular to work with any other projects requiring 24mm buttons (like Flatbox), and designed to the standards you've come to expect from us. Most importantly, we wanted to do right by all the people who supported us on our journey here.

Like I mentioned, injection molding is quite expensive, but the only reason we were able to get here in the first place is through people taking a chance on our design and vision. Therefore, it only felt right to provide these buttons to those who made them happen. If you own a GRAM SLIM or any other choc-compatible GRAM, you can get a set of these for free! Join our discord for more information.

 

 

I want to say thank you for supporting us on this crazy journey. We love seeing all the cool mods and great feedback in our community, and we can't wait to bring you more cool shit. Cheers to y'all!

- Grammy$$$