More about Input Labs
Who are we?
Input Labs Oy. (OsakeYhtiö) is a small company established in Finland, Europe.
Founded in 2022 by 2 friends, both engineers and gamers: Marcos (born in Spain) and Michael (born in Germany). Later several friends joined as testers, idea givers and contributors. And now we are waiting for you.
You can talk with us on Discord anytime.
Our principles and goals
We embrace open source, backward compatibility, right to repair, and privacy. We are disgusted by FOMO, predatory sales, and people imposing their preferences.
We are not a startup, our goal is not to grow artificially, but to create a stable environment for research and development.
We welcome and support everyone in our community, we do not leave anyone behind.
Get in contact
If you want to collaborate with us, check the Contribute section.
For journalism or videogame media topics, check the Press section.
For other generic inquiries, send us a message to (Cannot be copied)
Why not Kickstarter?
The very first reason, because Kickstarter is a platform for "pre-ordering" products, but Input Labs does not make products.
The other reason is a bit more philosophical, when someone "buys" something in Kickstarter, the company gets some money but they also get debt (with the backers), and debt is bad. We do not want to be in debt with anyone.
On the contrary, with Patreon the relation between the creator and the patron is much more healthy, transparent, and direct. We do what we love to do, and you can support us if you love it too.
Do you sell controllers?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: For now we are only offering some selected parts, which are more problematic for people to source or build. And even if we offer a bigger variety of DIY kits and parts later, we may never sell assembled controllers.
For example, the Alpakka components page outlines where you can buy components or DIY kits.
What does the logo mean?
The logo is a sinusoidal wave representing an analog signal, being captured by code brackets (digital), in the shape of an hexagon, because hexagons are the bestagons.
I'm not high, I promise.
When you think blue, green, or red, you associate these with some specific videogame brands, right? We don't settle with a single color, because our favorite color is your favorite color, also we like rainbows, and RGB LED unicorn puke in all its PC gamer glory.
Why these funny animal names?
We named our 2 first devices Alpakka and Kapybara, these are actually spelt correctly in finnish language. That's our little tribute to Finland, a country that took us as their own fellows.
We also found funny that gaming companies are sometimes calling their products with 90's style radical animal names, such as the "Cobra", "Black Puma", or "Death Hornet" (not actual names).
Instead we go for the most huggable, weird, and cute animals; mocking corporation marketing. Please give us ideas for the next ones!
On the shoulders of giants
Input Labs wouldn't be possible without other open source projects, our love and gratitude goes to these legends:
- KiCad: An incredible tool for PCB design.
- Blender: The acclaimed 3D app we're abusing as CAD.
- TinyUSB: A cool simple library for USB communication.
- Raspberry: You may have heard about these guys.
- PrusaSlicer: Another must-have for 3D printing.
- Pug: The HTML template library this web is made with.
- Plausible: Privacy-friendly web analytics.
Privacy
This website do not use cookies, do not store any personal information, and respect your privacy. We do not care who you are! and that's a good thing.
For aggregated usage stats we use Plausible, an open-source web analytics tool which is 100% anonymous, do not track you across different websites nor devices, and is hosted in the European Union (covered by strict privacy laws).
For details, read the full Privacy policy.