About Unreal Keyboards — Credentials & Background

Unreal Keyboards is Brian “BuddyOG” Gebo — a professional design drafter turned Topre specialist, and the builder and measurement lab behind the Dome Lab. Everything published here — the force-curve data, the hand-modeled switch geometry, the parts intelligence — comes from the background below. No mystique, just credentials.

The trade

CAD since 2003. Graduated Assabet Valley (Marlborough, MA) in 2006 with a Diploma & Certificate of Proficiency in Drafting and 1,600 certified hours of AutoCAD and SolidWorks — top of the drafting class, third in the graduating class across all trades. First student in Assabet's history permitted to begin a co-op placement before senior year, starting at the end of junior year into the summer of 2005.

Measuring parts by hand — as a job

The skill the Dome Lab's switch models rest on was a paid profession first. At Wolf Coach (Auburn, MA), the assignment was building solid models of stocked inventory parts by hand, from digital micrometer measurements — each model checked by engineers before acceptance. The models routinely passed first check without revision, and the output ran in batches large enough that additional engineers were pulled in to keep up with the checking. Seven months, forty-hour weeks, hundreds into the thousands of parts measured and modeled.

That is precisely the process behind the Topre & EC Switch Explorer: real parts, a digital micrometer, and SolidWorks models built to those measurements — then a cross-section traced 1:1 from the models.

The career

Seven positions as a designer/drafter — 84 months of professional CAD work — known in every shop as the SolidWorks expert:

Wolf Coach (CACI) — mechanical drafting & systems documentation; micrometer-to-model inventory program; customer schematic documentation.
Cytyc (now Hologic) — medical-device drafting: SolidWorks modeling, AutoCAD detailing, engineering change orders — a co-op chosen for the pay and the challenge of medical-device rigor.
Innov-X Systems — SolidWorks 2008 modeling and detailing; PDMWorks administrator; engineering change and document control.
Metso Automation — two and a half years of SolidWorks design, ECO process, PDMWorks lead administration.
Rodney Hunt–Fontaine — master parametric assemblies with top-down design in SolidWorks, Excel, and KBMax; reverse-engineering part relations from existing masters and design tables; customer specifications driving automatic generation of complete 3D assemblies, shop drawings, and fabrication packages.
Litecontrol — design engineering: SolidEdge-to-SolidWorks transition, a heavily customized Enterprise PDM implementation, engineering-order prioritization systems, and macro-driven automation triggered by PDM workflow transitions.
Stapla Ultrasonics — CAD administration.

Alongside the drafting itself: roughly a decade of PLM/PDM work through 2017 — Enterprise PDM administration, CAD configurator automation, and workflow tooling in VBA, VB.NET, and C#.

The standard

Extensive working command of design best practices: GD&T, ANSI drafting rules, dimension stacking, fully defined parts, and properly dimensioned drawings — driving versus driven (reference) dimensions and why the difference matters.

There was a period when the in-house shop would not accept a drawing from engineering unless it carried this name — either as draftsman, or stamped “CHECKED BY BRIAN GEBO.” Every drawing engineering produced was marked up and returned at the end of each day.

Then: Topre

Unreal Keyboards applies that discipline to electrostatic capacitive keyboards. The work spans custom Topre & EC builds and commissions, a carbon fiber finishing craft now in its sixth year, and precision component work — measured, documented, repeatable.

The Dome Lab is the public face of that discipline: force curves measured at 0.005 mm resolution on calibrated hardware, switch geometry micrometer-measured and hand-modeled, a parts library carrying tolerance findings nobody else publishes, and typing tests recorded to a strict, unaltered standard. If a number appears on this site, it was measured here or it's labeled otherwise.

Professional history verifiable on LinkedIn.