You can never have too many external, tactile interfaces. Just like you’re able to smash a giant enter key for every line break, tools like the Elgato Streamdeck offer you additional dedicated buttons for your most common tasks. The ChonkerKeys are a new initiative that landed on Kickstarter to provide you with dedicated buttons for your video meetings at work. And after you left the meeting with the giant ‘Leave meeting’ button, you can simply swap the keys out for a new combination of common tasks!
What are Chonker Keys?
The ChonkerKeys are a set of big round keys on a board that you can connect to your PC or laptop with a USB-C cable. The default layout is perfect for video calls, with dedicated buttons for mute / unmute, enable video, like (thumbs up), screen sharing and a bright red button to leave a meeting (my personal favorite).
You can easily detach the buttons and swap them for others, placing them freely into a layout you prefer on the ChonkerKeys pad. There’s a larger layout called The Max, which has additional keys for forward, play/pause and start/stop recording. Furthermore, you’ll be supplied with additional blank keys that you can dedicate new functions to.
LED backlights provide you with a good status indicator on whether you’re muted or not.
The buttons have been painstakingly crafted to feel and sound very satisfying whenever you press them, check out the video clip below to see the action.
Features
- Color: white, red and clear
- Number of Keys for The Original: 2x 1u; 2x 1.5u; 1x 3u
- Number of Keys for The Max & 3 Keys: 9x 1u; 2x 1.5u; 1x 3u
- Switches: mechanical switches with high spring rate and clicky sound
- Number of full color LEDs: 3 in the 1u key, 4 in the 1.5u key, 6 in the 3u key
- Connection: USB Type-C in the keypad
- Cable: Coiled USB Type-A to USB Type-C
- Materials: ABS and PC / PP
- Dimensions of The Original: 234mm x 127mm x 48mm
- Dimensions of The Max: 234mm x 179mm x 48mm
- Weight of The Original: about 450g
- Weight of The Max: about 670g
- Weight of Keys: 1u – about 30g; 1.5u – about 45g; 3u – about 90g
Who are the ChonkerKeys for?
The ChonkerKeys are ideal when you’re working remotely and need to do a lot of video meetings. It’s pretty satisfying to press a large red button to leave a meeting instead of pointing and clicking.
Additionally, whenever you’re fan of the Elgato Stream Deck and you’re looking for something similar (and softer) the ChonkerKeys will provide you with similar customizability for your common video and streaming tasks.
Since the buttons are really big, we can imagine this will be a handy tool for the visually impaired to do video meetings as well
Where can I buy the ChonkerKeys?
The ChonkerKeys campaign already reached its funding goal on Kickstarter. You can still pledge to receive your own unit for about sixty bucks, which is estimated to ship early 2022 at the time of writing.
