Sometimes you might want to browse your favorite social media site while eating a sandwich, or throwing darts, or fending off an attacker with a sword. You know, normal things that might occupy only one of your hands. If you’ve ever found yourself in such a situation, then this custom Reddit keyboard could be for you.
Built by [jangxx], this little board is about as simple as it gets. Even if you aren’t looking for a way to browse /r/cooking while practicing your single-handed egg cracking technique, the same principles could be used to quickly throw together a macro keyboard for whatever your particular needs might be.
Inside the 3D printed enclosure is nothing more exotic than an Arduino Pro Micro and five Cherry MX Red switches. The switches have been wired directly to the GPIO pins on the Arduino, and a simple Sketch takes care of the rest. [jangxx] has written the code in such a way that you can easily define the mapping of USB HID keys to physical switches right at the top of the file, making it easy to reuse for your own purposes.
As simple as this project is, we really like the trouble that [jangxx] went through on the 3D printed key caps. The white up and down arrows allow you to navigate through the posts, and the center key selects the one you want to view. Since it’s for Reddit, naturally the red and blue buttons for rapid voting. When you want to go back to the list of posts, just hit the center button again.
Back in 2011 we saw a dedicated Reddit voting peripheral, but we think the addition of simple navigation keys makes this project a bit more compelling. Incidentally, if you can think of any other reason you might want a one-handed keyboard for browsing Reddit…we definitely don’t want to hear about it.
So you can follow and feed the hive mind faster.
Watch the human as he recoils in horror at normal human activity. Maybe you can tell us how humans do better when they don’t interact.
Normal human interaction comprises more than a series of Boo’s and Yeah’s to reinforce the prevailing ideas.
…you sure about that?
Script would work faster.
You do realize how Redditors themselves would regard/comment on a “one handed keyboard”, right?
Beyond that, this would be a neat teaching intro for playing with keyboard input/coding.
Pretty sure that’s the joke in the last sentence of the post…
Can we make membrane keyboard instead this?
Yeah I’m curious about that because the “commercial” solution I know (from eevblog) you are going to cry with the price for single batch. (If I do remember, like 150US? for the membrane + cover).
I would do a cheap DIY aluminium sandwitch instead!
Everyone needs a custom keyboard for some application!
If you have a 3D printer, making the frame/box is trivial, and the parts cost is just a few bucks.
Do it!
Heh, I just built a similar device, though it’s based around a vintage calculator keypad (the one at bottom right here: http://www.surplussales.com/Switches/SWKeypads-1.html ). Mostly replicating arrow and other cursor control keys, wasd, and media keys, with one key (and a mode LED) to toggle it to a mousekeys emulator. It’s mostly to make up for the suboptimal placement of my laptop on a TV tray in front of the couch.
What is that “up-vote” button doing there? Totally useless on Reddit. You could post a real cure for Cancer on Reddit and immediately get a massive number of down-votes.