Yubico Forum

I just received my Yubikey, but noticed that mine is different than the pictures I have seen of the Yubikey 2.0.

Instead of a lighted round circle, mine has a lighted dot in the middle of it. When its not lighted it looks like a black dot in the middle of where you push. Is this the latest version?

My firmware version is 2.1.3

Interesting. Link to picture of this?

Here are a couple of mine, its hard to take a good picture with the light on.

I think I prefer the green ring, myself. How can you see if the light turns off when you press the contact now? It's under your finger.

I wonder if the keys are more robust this way, because they don't have to rely on the 4 thin "X" bridging contacts over the translucent circuit board.

Yes I was was thinking I liked the circle/ring better. but I'll take this if its the latest version. I also think it would look better with a blue led.

Edit: I haven't owned this very long, so I'm still getting used to pushing the button. I had just been counting to get an idea of how long to hold it, I didn't realize the light turns off while pressing it. I've had a few times where it didn't do anything after pressing it, but I'm thinking maybe its just because I am not used to using it, I haven't owned a Yubikey before this.

I like setting something into the second config (even if I won't use it). Because the behavior changes: a very short instantaneous tap is sufficient to emit the OTP then.

But if the second config is empty the keys operate in "legacy" mode where you have to hold down the contact for a while. I think for users who are not yubikey-savvy, having an instant-press behavior is easier to learn.

Yes - we recently switched over to the "dot" design that now replaces the "ring" design. This is a part of our production ramp-up program where we've worked on things that improves and streamlines the production process.

There are a couple of reasons why we've abandoned the ring, but one important aspect is that the light intensity has over time not always been 100% consistent in a produced batch of keys. It has shown to be far more efficient to get a consistent light intensity and also to automatically verify it in production.

I personally think the dot is an improvement. A blue dot would of course look nice, but as we're a green company, there is at least a reason to keep the color what it is

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

In my opinion, having the light covered during operation (under the finger) is a design defect, since the light is the only feedback indicator we have. Consider in some apps, the key strokes to passwords are hidden! So you can't even tell whether the key has been activated or not. If you don't get logged in, you don't have any feedback about what the problem was (key not programmed at all? didn't touch it firmly enough? key worked ok but something else wrong?) because you don't even know if the key was activated.

I could understand a point light for the reasons you say, but not one that's completely hidden under the finger this way.

At first I thought it was for identification of the new firmware version, but it seems not.
Is the touch also more sensitive now or is there no change in that?
The light consistency for the white version would be more visible I guess.

The light goes out for approx 3 seconds after a successful trigger so any "debugging" should be fairly straight-forward - touch and release. Is the light out and turns back on - then we have a successful trigger.

Yes - the original intent was to release the 2.2 firmware together with the new touch button design. We however delayed the release of the 2.2 firmware as we were awaiting feedback from key pilot customers and had to make a few months of supplies with 2.1 firmware keys using this new design.

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico