Hats Off To Another Weird Keyboard From Google Japan

October 7, 2023 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

As portable as keyboards have gotten, you still need some place to put the thing — some kind of bag for travel, and a flat surface for using it. Well, it doesn’t get much more portable than a hat keyboard, now does it?

Every October 1st, Google Japan likes to celebrate the 101-key keyboard by building something revolutionary off the top of their heads. (10/1… 101… get it?) This year was no exception — they created the GCAPS, a ballcap-like device with a single switch inside.

In order to use it, you spin the hat left and right until the desired character is reached, and the rotation is detected by a gyroscope. Then you press down on the top of the hat to send the key codes via Bluetooth.

Under the hood, the hat uses an M5Stick C Plus and, to our dismay, a micro switch that wasn’t even made by Cherry. Oh well — we landed on the clicky side, so that’s great in our book. Surprisingly, there exists a skull cap/hat skeleton thing on which to build a platform for pressing down on the switch. Just like the teaboard and the long boi keyboards, this thing is completely open source.

Since it types in Japanese, there’s no word on whether it types in all caps, though we like to think that it would given the object it represents. Be sure to check out the product reveal video after the break.

Continue reading “Hats Off To Another Weird Keyboard From Google Japan” →

We’d Sure Like To Strum The Chrumm Keyboard

October 5, 2023 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

If you want something as personal as a keyboard done right, you have to do it yourself. Not quite satisfied with the multitude of mechanical offerings out there, [summific] decided to throw their hat into the ring and design the Chrumm keyboard. And boy, are we glad they did.

Between the lovely tenting angle and tilt, the gorgeous flexible PCBs, and the pictures that could pass for renders, [summific] has given us something beautiful to behold that we can only dream of thocking on. Even the honeycomb plate is nice. Oh, but this monoblock split is completely open source.

This Raspberry Pi Pico-powered keyboard features a 3D printable case design without visible screws, and a rotary encoder in the middle. Those palm rests are firmly attached from the underside. Why are the thumb cluster keycaps upside down? It’s not meant to drive you insane; it’s because the contour is more finger-friendly that way, according to some people.

[summific] makes this look easy, but it doesn’t matter, because all the hard work is already done. If you want something easier, start with a macropad. Or a macro pad, even.

Via reddit

Single-Button Keyboard Has Multiple Uses

September 26, 2023 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

Well now why would I want a single-button keyboard, you might be asking yourself. We say it all depends on how you build the thing, and how you program it. Would you believe that the MagiClick by [Modular] is capable of showing live weather information or the date and time, acting as animated dice, or being a stopwatch and Pomodoro timer? Now you’re beginning to understand.

Before we get much further, yes, this bad boy has two additional buttons on the sides. But the spirit of the thing is in the single large switch in the middle. It’s hiding beneath the 0.85″ 128×128 display, which is protected from pressure and fingerprints by that Pop-o-Matic bubble over the top. While the big button is the main operator used to access the function options, the side buttons are used as auxiliaries to exit and return to the home screen.

MagiClick is based on the ESP32-S3 and is designed to run on CircuitPython. In addition to everything else packed into this thing, there are blinkenlights and a small speaker inside, plus a GPIO expansion header around back. Everything is available on GitHub if you want to build your own.

Not enough keys for you? Well, here’s one with two.

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Busy Box Macro Pad

September 21, 2023 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Well, I must admit that Google Translate completely failed me here, and thus I have no real idea what the trick is to this beautiful, stunning transparent split keyboard by [illness072]. Allegedly, the older tweets (exes?) hold the key to this magic, but again, Google Translate.

Based on top picture, I assume that the answer lies in something like thin white PCB fingers bent to accommodate the row stagger and hiding cleverly behind the keys.

Anyone who can read what I assume is Japanese, please advise what is going on in the comments below.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Busy Box Macro Pad” →

This Keyboard Doesn’t Work Without Game Boy Cartridges

September 11, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Just when we though we’d seen it all when it comes to custom keyboards (or most of it, anyway), along comes [Stu] with the TypeBoy and TypePak. Like the title implies, TypeBoy and TypePak are inseparable.

Let’s talk about TypePak first. Somehow, some way, [Stu] managed to fit the following into an aftermarket Game Boy Advance cartridge: a XIAO BLE microcontroller, a Sharp Memory Display, a shift register, and a LiPo battery. It’s all there in [Stu]’s incredibly detailed blog post linked above.

Amazing, no? And although [Stu] claims that the TypePak is mostly for aesthetics (boy howdy), it will make swapping microcontrollers much easier in the future.

If this looks sort of familiar, you may remember a likely render of [mujimaniac]’s board called the GIGA40 that also employed a cartridge system. Allegedly there is now a working prototype of the GIGA40.

Would you like to give the TypeBoy and TypePak a go? Files are available on GitHub, but this doesn’t seem like a project for the faint of heart.

Speaking of stuffing things in to Game Boy cartridges, check out this SNES cartridge turned hard drive enclosure.

Via KBD

Building Up Unicode Characters One Bit At A Time

September 7, 2023 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

The range of characters that can be represented by Unicode is truly bewildering. If there’s a symbol that was ever used to represent a sound or a concept anywhere in the world, chances are pretty good that you can find it somewhere in Unicode. But can many of us recall the proper keyboard calisthenics needed to call forth a particular character at will? Probably not, which is where this Unicode binary input terminal may offer some relief.

“Surely they can’t be suggesting that entering Unicode characters as a sequence of bytes using toggle switches is somehow easier than looking up the numpad shortcut?” we hear you cry. No, but we suspect that’s hardly [Stephen Holdaway]’s intention with this build. Rather, it seems geared specifically at making the process of keying in Unicode harder, but cooler; after all, it was originally his intention to enter this in last year’s Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest. [Stephen] didn’t feel it was quite ready at the time, but now we’ve got a chance to give this project a once-over.

The idea is simple: a bank of eight toggle switches (with LEDs, of course) is used to compose the desired UTF-8 character, which is made up of one to four bytes. Each byte is added to a buffer with a separate “shift/clear” momentary toggle, and eventually sent out over USB with a flick of the “send” toggle. [Stephen] thoughtfully included a tiny LCD screen to keep track of the character being composed, so you know what you’re sending down the line. Behind the handsome brushed aluminum panel, a Pi Pico runs the show, drawing glyphs from an SD card containing 200 MB of True Type Font files.

At the end of the day, it’s tempting to look at this as an attractive but essentially useless project. We beg to differ, though — there’s a lot to learn about Unicode, and [Stephen] certainly knocked that off his bucket list with this build. There’s also something wonderfully tactile about this interface, and we’d imagine that composing each codepoint is pretty illustrative of how UTF-8 is organized. Sounds like an all-around win to us.

Thin Keyboard Fits In Steam Deck Case

September 6, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Although some of the first Android-powered smartphones had them and Blackberries were famous for them, physical keyboards on portable electronics like that quickly became a thing of the past. Presumably the cost to manufacture is too high and the margins too low regardless of consumer demand. Whatever the reason, if you want a small keyboard for your portable devices you’ll likely need to make one yourself like [Kārlis] did for the Steam Deck.

Unlike a more familiar mechanical keyboard build which prioritizes the feel and sound of the keyboard experience, this one sacrifices nearly every other design consideration in order to be thin enough to fit in the Steam Deck case. The PCB is designed to be flexible using copper tape cut to size with a vinyl cutter with all the traces running to a Raspberry Pi Pico which hosts the firmware and plugs into the Steam Deck’s USB port. The files for the PCB are available in KiCad and can be exported as SVG files for cutting.

In the end, [Kārlis] has a functioning keyboard that’s even a little more robust than was initially expected and which does fit alongside the Deck in its case. On the other hand, [Kārlis] describes the typing experience as “awful” due to its extreme thinness, but either way we applaud the amount of effort that went in to building a keyboard with this form factor. The Steam Deck itself is a platform which lends itself to all kinds of modifications as well, from the control sticks to the operating systems, and Valve will even show you how.