The world’s loudest mechanical keyboard features relays and firecrackers to make noise

firecrackers going off on a desk while uwo's lab is typing — (Image credit: uwo's lab / X)

Creator uwo’s lab built the world’s loudest mechanical keyboard live on his Twitch channel, where he adds several noisemakers to liven up the typing experience. You can see in the preview shared on X (formerly Twitter) that he started with a 65% keyboard attached to a breadboard, which is then attached to relays and linear actuators that hit a steel plate. Apparently, the tinkling sound is not enough, so he added a steel tongue drum with two rubber mallets powered by compressed air, which hit the drum with every key press you make.

As for the finale, uwo’s lab wanted to add something special —a heating coil that would activate when you hit a certain typing speed, which gets so hot that it would ignite a short burst of machine-gun firecrackers. Unfortunately, he did not want to reprogram the breadboard, so he manually activated it with a battery. He tried doing it again a second time, but the fuse failed, so he just lit it up with a lighter and then typed while the firecrackers were blowing up.

The Twitch stream to create this doohickey, which, according to uwo’s lab, is below contraption but above thingamajig, took almost five hours, and the result was quite chaotic but fun. Aside from that, the build itself had wires, cables, and pneumatic hoses all over the place, adding to the mayhem, but you can still see the keyboard and the visual and aural pandemonium that happens when he starts typing.