How to catalog
your keyboard collection.

Why catalog at all?

For one board, you don't. The trouble starts around the third build, once you've started swapping switches between boards and you have more keycap sets than keyboards to put them on. A catalog isn't about proving you're a serious enthusiast. It's about answering the small, real questions a collection keeps asking you.

• What's actually in this board right now? Which switches, lubed or not, filmed or not, on which plate. After the third re-build you genuinely forget, and the only way to check is to pop the keycaps and open it up.
• Did I already buy this switch? You have a tub of switches. You're three vendor tabs deep on a "buy 110, save 10%" deal. Did you already get a full set of these last year, or are you thinking of someone else's review?
• What stage is the group buy at? A keycap set or kit you paid for months ago, sitting in a chat channel between "GB closed" and "shipping update soon." Easy to lose track of what's owed to you.
• What am I not typing on? Most collections have a board or two that got built, photographed once, and then never came off the shelf. Worth knowing before the next group buy opens.

A catalog answers these in a few seconds instead of a teardown or a scroll through six months of order emails. That's the whole case for keeping one.

What to record for each board.

A keyboard isn't one object — it's a stack of parts you chose, and the parts are the whole point. You don't need all of this on day one. Start with what's in front of you and let the rest fill in. Over time, a good entry holds:

• The case and mounting. The kit name, layout (60%, 65%, TKL, Alice, ortho, split), case material, and mounting style — gasket, top-mount, o-ring, leaf-spring. The feel of a board lives here, and it's the part you can't tell from a photo later.
• The switches. What's installed, the spring weight, and whether they're lubed, filmed, or stock. Note the plate they're on — brass, aluminum, FR4, POM, polycarbonate — because the same switch reads differently on each.
• The keycaps and stabilizers. Which set is on it (profile, ABS or PBT, the colorway name that's impossible to remember), and how the stabs were tuned — clipped, lubed, holee-modded, or band-aid.
• The history. Where the kit came from, what you paid, the group buy round, and whether it was an in-stock or a GB. Plus the firmware and where the keymap file lives if you ever reflash.
• The pictures. The built board, and the internals before you closed it up. A photo of the foam, the tape mod, and the switches saves you a teardown a year from now when you can't remember what made this one sound right.

That last point matters more than people expect. The thing that made a board sound and feel the way it does is usually some small combination you'll never reconstruct from memory — and a couple of photos hold it for you.

Switches, caps, and the parts bin.

Boards are only half of it. The other half is the loose inventory: switches you bought in bulk, keycap sets between homes, the deskmats, the spare PCBs, the artisans. This is where a catalog quietly earns its keep, because the parts bin is exactly the thing you can't see at a glance.

• Switch stock. How many of each you actually have. A full keyboard needs 60–110 switches, and "I think I have enough" is how you end up two short on build night.
• Keycap sets with no board. The set you bought because the colorway sold out fast, still in its box, waiting for the right kit. Easy to forget you own it.
• Mods and consumables. Films, the lube (3204, 205g0, the dielectric grease for stabs), foam, the switch puller you've lost three times.

Spreadsheet, database app, or a forum thread?

There's no dedicated app most keyboard people reach for — this hobby never settled on one. So here's the honest version of what collectors actually use.

A spreadsheet is free, it's yours, and it does exactly what you tell it. A lot of careful builders run their whole inventory in a sheet and never need more. The cost is friction: you build every column by hand, your build photos live somewhere else, and a switch tub doesn't map cleanly onto rows. If you like spreadsheets you already know this, and you're probably set. If you don't, you'll start one, log two boards, and never open it again.

A database app sits in the middle. There are shared keyboard-inventory templates floating around, and they're tidier than a raw sheet — relations between a board and its switches, a gallery view for builds. But you're still designing the database before you can use it, and your collection now lives on someone else's servers, behind a login, syncing to the cloud whether you wanted that or not.

A forum thread or desk-shot post is where this hobby has always shown its collection. It's social, it's the right crowd, and a build log thread is genuinely useful. But it's a public showcase, not a private record. It's ordered by date, not by board; it's a pain to search your own posts later; and nobody wants to list every switch tub and what they paid in public.

None of these is wrong. They're just built for different jobs — and "the running tally of everything I own, kept to myself" isn't really any of theirs.

Where a spreadsheet falls short.

A spreadsheet is great at the part of this that's a table. It's bad at the part that isn't. A keyboard collection is photos as much as numbers — the build shot, the internals, the colorway you'll never describe in words. Those don't belong in a cell, so they end up in a separate folder you stop maintaining. Pull the sheet up on your phone at a meetup and it's a pinch-and-zoom ordeal. And the switch bin, the keycap sets between boards, the half-finished build — none of it fits the one-row-per-board shape a sheet wants you to use. The data isn't hard. The shape is.

Why keep it private.

This is a hobby that lives in public — group buy chats, forum threads, desk shots. That's most of the fun. But there's a difference between showing off a build and publishing an inventory. A full list of every board, every keycap set, what each one cost, and roughly where it all sits is a tidy shopping list for the wrong person, and grails get stolen out of mail and off desks often enough that people stay quiet about totals.

Hoblio takes the other side of that trade. No account, no marketplace, no public profile. Show the build wherever you like. Keep the ledger to yourself.

What a board costs to own.

Add what a build cost — the kit, the switches, the caps, the mods all add up faster than anyone admits — and Hoblio shows what it works out to for each day you've owned it. The daily driver you type on for work quietly settles into a small number. The grail you built, photographed, and shelved stays a larger one. Tap Use on the days you actually type on a board, and you'll also see which ones earn their spot on the desk. No lecture. Just the figures, there when you want them.

A wishlist, and the group buys you're waiting on.

The kit you keep going back to look at. The keycap set whose interest-check just went up. Keep wanted boards apart from the ones you own, so a want stays a want — and the collection only grows when you mean it to. It's also a fine place to note the group buys you've already paid for but haven't received, so a kit in limbo for eight months doesn't quietly fall out of memory.

Hoblio isn't for you if…

Worth being straight about. If what you really want is live market value — what your grail kit or that sold-out keycap set goes for on the aftermarket today — Hoblio doesn't do that, and it isn't trying to. Sites and communities built around resale will serve you far better there; check the dedicated trading subreddits and the listings on a marketplace. Same if you want a place to buy and sell, or a public profile to show off a collection: that's a forum thread or a marketplace, not this. Hoblio is for the quiet part — your own private record of what you own and what it cost, kept on your phone. If that's not the part you care about, one of the options above is the honest answer.

Yours, and only yours.

Your collection lives on your phone. No account. No cloud. No tracking. Exporting, sharing, feedback, and purchase restore only happen when you choose them. No subscription, either — Hoblio Pro is one price, paid once. And no streaks, no reminders. A keyboard doesn't need an app to nag you; it just sits on the desk, ready when you are.