They say you should never cheap out on anything that comes between you and the ground, like tires, shoes, and mattresses. We would take that a little further into the 21st century and extend it to anything between you and work. In our case, ‘buy nice or buy twice’ includes keyboards and mice.
[Marcus Young] is a fan of ortholinear ergonomic comfort, but not of cables. He gave [adereth]’s dactyl keyboard some wings by using a Bluetooth micro, and the Pterodactyl was born. Of course, the two halves still use a TRRS cable to communicate, and wires are required to charge batteries, but it’s the principle of the thing.
That’s not all [Marcus] did to make the dactyl his own — it also has a modified full-fat base that gives him all the room in the world to wire up the keyswitch matrix compared to the original streamlined design.
Instead of the usual Teensy, Pro Micro, or Proton-C, the pterodactyl has a Feather 32u4 in its belly. [Marcus] is clacking on Holy Panda switches which we’ve been meaning to try, and individual PCBs for each switch, which seems like it might negate gluing the switches in place so they survive through keycap changes. Check out [Marcus]’ write-up to see what he learned during this build.
This isn’t the first modified dactyl we’ve seen flying around here, and it won’t be the last. Here’s one with a dual personality — both halves can work together or alone.
Via r/mk
I see he added a key to exit vim. Most useful keyboard.
Many years ago, when I was in uni near Boston and we had a wide variety of systems on campus, including a number running Berkely Unix, there was a form of DWIM available. These were multiuser with a lot of shared utility, and users of certain privilege could do such things as update the shared lexicon for spell, as well as their own.
Or update the DWIM dictionary. To replace vi with emacs.
And I thought the only way to exit vim was to pull the plug ;P
“ZZ” – save & exit.
Feather 32u4 does not have Bluetooth. Is he using a BLE module?
There are different flavors of the 32u4. It looks like a adafruit 3379 to me.
You can get a Feather 32u4 with a BLE module onboard, like the ADAFRUIT Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE, which appears to be what they’re using
I wonder what the key press latency looks like. Probably good enough for typing but I wonder if a gaming keyboard could be converted with the same bluetooth setup.