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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Circuit Sculpture Keyboard

January 7, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

The left half of GEMK-47, a mechanical keyboard with a round screen. — Image by [New-Concentrate6308] via reddit

Don’t worry, [New-Concentrate6308] is working on the GitHub for this final build of 2024, dubbed the GEMK_47. That stands for Grid Ergo Magnetic Keyboard, but I swear there are 48 keys.

What we’ve got here is a split ergo with an ortholinear layout. There’s a round screen and encoder on the left side, and a 35 mm trackpad on the right. There’s also space for some other round thing on this side, should you want another rotary encoder or whatever fits in place of the spacer.

Internally, there’s a Waveshare RP2040 Tiny and a mixture of Gateron Oil Kings and Gateron Yellow V3 switches. That lovely case is printed in silk silver PLA, but [New-Concentrate6308] wants to try metal-filled PLA for the next version. Although the original idea was to go wireless, ZMK didn’t play nicely with that round display, which of course is non-negotiable.

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One To Watch For In 2025: Tanmatsu

January 7, 2025 by Jenny List 18 Comments

If you’ve used the Espressif series of processors, perhaps you’ll have heard of their upcoming ESP32-P4. This is an application processor, with dual RISC-V cores at 400 MHz, and save for a lack of an MMU, a spec sheet much closer to the kind of silicon you’d find in single board computers with pretensions towards being a mini-PC.

It was announced a year ago and there have been limited numbers of pre-release versions of the chip available to developers, but thus far there have been very few boards featuring it. We’re excited then to note that a P4-based board we’ve been watching for a while is finally breaking cover, and what’s more, you can now pre-order one.

The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is an all-in-one palmtop computer for hackers, with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display. It’s designed with plenty of expansion in mind, and it’s got space on board for a LoRa radio. The reason we’re interested is that it comes from some of our friends in the world of event badges, so we’ve seen and handled real working prototypes, and we know that its makers come from a team with a proven record in manufacture and delivery of working hardware. The prototype we saw had hardware that was very close to the final version, and an operating system and software that was still under development but on track for the April release of the device. It will be fully open-source in both hardware and software.

We liked what we saw and have pre-ordered one ourselves, so we’ll be sure to bring you a closer look when it arrives.

Logging Baby’s Day In Linux

January 7, 2025 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

There’s plenty of surprises to be had when you become a parent, and one of the first is that it’s suddenly your job to record the frequency of your infant’s various bodily functions in exacting detail. How many times did the little tyke eat, how long did they sleep, and perhaps most critically, how many times did they poop. The pediatrician will expect you to know these things, so you better start keeping notes.

Or, if you’re [Triceratops Labs], you build a physical button panel that will keep tabs on the info for you. At the press of each button, a log entry is made on the connected Raspberry Pi Zero W, which eventually makes its way to a web interface that you can view to see all of Junior’s statistics.

In terms of hardware, this one is quite simple — it’s really just an array of arcade-style push buttons wired directly into the Pi’s GPIO header. Where it shines is in the software. This project could have been just a Python script and a text file, but instead it uses a MariaDB database on the back-end, with Apache and PHP serving up the web page, and a custom Systemd service to tie it all together. In other words, it’s what happens when you let a Linux admin play with a soldering iron.

It probably won’t come as much surprise to find that hackers often come up with elaborate monitoring systems for their newborn children, after all, it’s a great excuse for a new project. This machine learning crib camera comes to mind.