For some of us, the Speak ‘n Spell evokes pleasant memories of childhood as our first computer, along with one of those Merlin things. For others, it’s the ultimate circuit bending victim. For [Jeremy Geppert], they’re all-around good fun and he wanted to immortalize the device in a Simple Add-On (SAO).
This is [Jeremy]’s first board and SAO rolled into one, motivated by both Supercon and the SAO Contest. To start things off, [Jeremy] scaled down the design we all know and love to fit a 128×32 OLED display, and it looks great. The plan is to have the display, an amplified speaker, and a single button for input.
Before committing the board order, [Jeremy] had a brief freak-out about the pin distance as it relates to the window for the OLED display. Luckily, his brother suggested checking things first by printing a 1:1 scale image of the board outline, and laying that over the display.
This is the week it all comes together, as the tiny switches and (regular-size) connectors have arrived, and the boards are due quite soon. Go, [Jeremy], go!
“Now try…”
Blee doo bee bloop!
Whoever designs “ABCDE”-keyboards in 2024 instead of “QWERTY” deserves a place in hell. It offers no faster typing to people who first encounter a keyboard but do know the alphabt. Yes, QWERTY is archaic, but everyone* is used to it so we’re stuck until the neuralink comes along.
*Yes, I know, there’s AZERTY and the like. As are non-western script keyboards. In our region we’re stuck with it.
This is a small badge based on a kids toy from 1979. A kid would probably get lost and frustrated on qwerty. I will never have probes for that in my brain. This hommage to the kids toy is focusing on details, but the keyboard is non-functional in the first place.
I think a kid would get just as lost on an abcd keyboard. Generally, they learn individual letter before they learn the alphabetical order. Even I, given a random letter, can not alwas say the next of previous letter in the alphabet.
Knowing the order of the alphabet is a largely irrellevant skill other than for looking up things in an alphabetically ordered list, like a paper dictionary or a phonebook.
With the dying out of these, the skill of knowing alphabetical order might go out of fashion.
Also used by KRAFTWERK in Numbers.
„one two“
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcbX6HZqbxU