Totally stunning! Really nice work!

This hack sure was worth the effort. The effect is great and offers more possibilities for playing around with the keyboard.

For example you could make light radiate from the key you just pressed and fading out across the other keys.
You could also use it to play games on the keyboard using the keyboard as a display (i just can’t imagine anything that would play good).

Extremely nice, one of the hacks i would consider doing myself.

Posted at 2:44 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by Lupin

I can imagine a perfect game to play on that keyboard…. light’s out.

Really neat hack, btw.

Posted at 2:52 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by _matt

you could play snake… Kinda.

But I really like the ripple effect idea allot.

Posted at 3:17 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by Dontknowmuch

Wow! Neat :-)

Posted at 4:03 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by johannes

this is really cool.

the thermal effect though, that would be very bad to have enabled when typing passwords

Posted at 4:04 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by lefty

He used a 68HC908JB8…brings back memories. It’s still a good chip for low-end USB projects. Cheap, has USB hardware built in, meaning that you just grab the interrupt and see what bytes you just received. While the effective instruction rate is around 1 MIPS, it still compares well against a similar-cost setup using software USB on an ATTiny, since the AVR is spending nearly all of its time on USB. The downside is development…he uses Codewarrior and assembly, but you can actually find a free HC08JB8 assembler from PE-Micro. The chip supports in-circuit programming, but you have to set a few jumpers and apply 11 volts to program it.

Posted at 4:07 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by macegr

For $150, that keyboard should already have this functionality.

Posted at 4:36 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by da66en

This thing is so cool. A much more affordable alternative to the optimus maximus keyboard. The next step is to take it RGB. That would be a killer product. I would pay $200 for an RGB version. Even if it was just RGB on a-z.

Posted at 4:49 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by Chris McDonald

I just stumbled across one on thinkgeek
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/a85c/

Posted at 4:56 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by Chris McDonald

This is awesome, really really great hack..

I wish i knew more about circuitry.

Posted at 6:46 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by microhaxo

might be bad for passwords…

Posted at 9:31 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by deoryp

cool hack …

which keys do you light for beeing useful? what about a typing aid system?
-> Light the keys that are more probable depending on the last characters entered.

There are some powerfull modeling tools for text compression (context tree weighting) that look at the last 5-10 characters and assign probabilities for next characters.

Posted at 12:33 pm on Nov 19th, 2008 by schobi

schobi: A typing aid system would just be useful for people who actually look at their keyboard while typing. My keyboard is usually below the table where i can’t see it.

_matt: I’ve also thought about lightsout (because i really like that game :)). But the keys arent in a 90 degrees grid. Actually you could just play it perfectly well on an 3×4 region on the numpad.

Posted at 2:35 pm on Nov 19th, 2008 by Lupin

I must not be good at online games because I only have a regular $10 keyboard. I’d better go get a “gaming” keyboard immediately

This hack is awesome though

Posted at 6:05 pm on Nov 19th, 2008 by Alcoholic

this type of stuff is hard to learn when english isnt your first language

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