My favourite hobby has always been exploring vintage mechanical keyboards. These keyboards were built with switches that no longer exist in production, which makes them rare and exciting to restore. The biggest challenge has always been finding reliable information. The documentation is scattered, incomplete, and sometimes lost to time.
Years ago, a website called Deskthority hosted a detailed wiki that explained every switch family, every era of Alps and Cherry engineering, and every obscure keyboard design. Eventually, ownership changed and large parts of the wiki became accessible only through internet archives. Fortunately, the community at The Mechanical Keyboard Club worked together and rebuilt the wiki page by page. They copied what they could, added what was missing, uploaded photos, and continued the preservation that Deskthority once started.
While exploring this new community wiki, I realized how difficult it still was to search through hundreds of technical pages. I wanted a tool that would understand the relationships between different switches, answer detailed questions, and bring the entire history together through intelligent retrieval. That idea gradually turned into Vintage Wiki RAG, a personal attempt to preserve this knowledge in a smarter and more searchable form.
🌟 What I Created
Vintage Wiki RAG is a Retrieval Augmented Generation system that transforms these scattered community wiki pages into a fast and meaningful search engine. Instead of simply matching keywords, it understands context and retrieves the most relevant technical documents.
The current version indexes around 160 pages related to Alps Electric switches. This includes SKCL variants, SKCM tactile and clicky mechanisms, plate spring designs, and early magnetic reed switches. The retrieval system consistently reaches more than 65 percent top-one accuracy, which makes it surprisingly helpful for questions that even experts debate.
You can ask about the differences between Alps generations, the internal structure of a specific switch, or what makes a tactile mechanism unique. The system will bring the right document to the surface and link directly to the source page.
🔎 Features
Fast semantic search using embeddings and FAISS
Top ranked retrieval with links to the original wiki articles
Streamlit interface for direct querying
FastAPI backend for structured retrieval workflows
🚧 What I Am Improving
Vintage keyboards deserve a complete knowledge engine, so I’m pushing the project further:
Expanding from Alps → every page on the wiki (ultimately ~3,000 pages)
Adding evaluation metrics (Recall@k, MRR) for objective retrieval scoring
Exploring rerankers + agent-style RAG for deeper reasoning
Building answer synthesis pipelines with structured citations
🛠️ Tech Stack
Python, FastAPI, Streamlit
FAISS (vector store)
SentenceTransformers (embeddings)
Markdown ingestion (custom parser)
🎯 Why This Project Matters to Me
This project started with curiosity. It became something that helps preserve a part of keyboard history that could easily disappear again. Vintage switch engineering is full of unique designs and forgotten innovations. Many of these ideas never returned in modern keyboards, so the information is valuable for collectors and restorers who want to understand how these devices were built.
I wanted a tool that does not just store information. I wanted something that understands it, searches it meaningfully, and keeps it accessible for anyone who cares about this craft. Vintage Wiki RAG is my way of keeping that history alive.
