Aflion Runner

“Rising out of bed just after dawn you greet the day with a yawn and a stretch. You slide on your favorite runners, throw on your trusty windbreaker and head out the door. With your favorite tunes jamming in your ears you push on as you hit a new personal best. But today isn’t any normal day. Today you feel inspired. You press on, crisp air in your lungs and a burn in your calves but you keep going. Like all things in life, you continue forward. You make one last sprint. It feels good. It feels amazing to push yourself beyond limits. This is the life. “

The Runner switch really is just a happy little accident. While designing the Melody I received a batch of samples with the incorrect leaf which made them feel much heavier and very tactiles. These sat for a bit while waiting on updated samples but I decided to throw them into a board and immediately fell in love. I ended up liking them so much that I started work on a colorway as soon as possible. The production version of the Runner will feature a nylon top and bottom housing with a long pole tactile stem with a tactile force drop akin to that found in switches like U4Ts, Holy Pandas, and Dark Jades.

Runner Switch Specs:

• Tactile
• Nylon Top
• POM Long-pole Stem
• Nylon Bottom
• 70g Bottom Out
• Dual Stage Spring
• 3.5mm Travel
• Factory Hand Lubed

Sunsetting the Runners

A few months after the release of the Runners we started to receive reports of switches misfiring, chattering or just “not working”. While we were not able to determine that an issue was present with our in-house switches we did immediately reach out to the community once we became aware this was a serious issues. With the awesome help of the community we were able to determine the cause of these issues, gain a rough idea of how many users were affected, and try to determine a fix for future runs.

The primary cause of the trouble switches, which affected anywhere from 2-8% of the switches per order which were reported to us*, was related to one of the bottom housing molds having poor tolerances which allowed the leaf to move freely after a time. When used in hotswap boards the leaf would become loose in the housing from the act of inserting and removing the switch. This caused the contact point inside the switch to intermittently disconnect which can break the signal chain and cause a false keypress. In some cases, one poor switch could trigger a barrage of keypresses which would then trick the MCU into thinking that multiple switches were misfiring.

The immediate solution from vendors was to offer replacement switches to those who were affected. We then set out to determine how we could fix the issue and again turned to our community for photos of the housings, inside and out, which were associated with non-functional switches. After examining these photos and forwarding them to Aflion for review it was determined that there was no clear identifying marker on the bottom housings for us to locate the troublesome mold of the bunch. As such, it was decided that the Runner switch would be sunset to maybe return under a different manufacturer and/or perhaps as a spiritual successor under another moniker.

*2-8% reflects rough percentages of the batches that were reported. Many thousands of Runners were released into the wild with no reports of issues which leads us to believe the number to be much smaller. In any case, even a failure rate of 1% is unacceptable without a clear way to correct it. This is what ultimately lead to the decision to sunset the switch.