It’s been a minute since I featured a tiny keyboard, and that’s okay. But if you want to get your feet wet in the DIY keyboarding community, making a little macro pad like [Arnov Sharma]’s Paste Pal is a great place to start.

This is a follow-up to his original Paste Pal, which only had two buttons for copy and paste plus an OLED display. This updated version does three more things thanks to a total of five blue (!) switches. The selected command shows up on the screen so you know what you’ve done.

Right now, [Arnov] has the Paste Pal set up to do Copy, Paste, Enter, Scroll Up, and Scroll Down, but changing the assignments is as easy as updating a few lines of code.

Paste Pal Mk. II is at heart a Seeed Xiao SAMD21, which in this case is programmed in Arduino. If you want to make things easier on yourself, you could program it in CircuitPython instead, although [Arnov] includes the Arduino code in his excellent build guide.

A Good Soldier, Indeed

RIP to [Pure-Bullfrog-2569]’s 7-year-old masterpiece of a hand-wired build, which recently gave its last keystroke.

Evidently this beauty is heavy, crappy, and hand-wired, but I have big doubts about the crappy part. It’s built out of layers of laser cut wood and hand-painted. It took [Pure-Bullfrog-2569] the better part of a year to pull this together. And now they feel too lazy to debug it.

At the urging of many redditors, it appears that [Pure-Bullfrog-2569] will set the keyboard aside for a later date, rather than just throwing or parting it out, or hanging it on the wall.

The controller itself is dead, which was a fake Teensy anyway, so maybe they’ll solder in an RP2040 or something and bring it back to life. Apparently it sounded pretty cool to type on. I bet it did!

The Centerfold: Screens, Screens Everywhere

Do you like screens, bro? Some people do. I myself have two, but I also used a tablet back when I was streaming so I could manage my unruly chat full of tumbleweeds and crickets. Having sort of been there, I can see why a person would want a lot of screens if they have a lot going on. Apparently [theslinkyvagabond] does, what with the three-server home lab and all to manage. Maybe it’s the relative darkness, or the fact that all the screens are currently the same, but this somehow seems cozy for a five-screen setup. No mention of the keyboards, although the one on the left looks intriguing.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the SEGA Pico Keyboard

I know, I know; this looks like my typical centerfold choice. But hear me out. So I was trying to get ChatGPT to trawl GitHub for new-ish hardware keyboard projects on my behalf, and it came back with this intriguing picture of a SEGA keyboard. There was also a Hello Kitty variant!

Now of course the actual link it listed goes to a DIY keyboard with a Raspberry Pi Pico inside, which is a nice build, by the way. You should check it out.

But anyway, back to this Japanese Fisher Price situation. It is apparently an accessory for the SEGA Pico system, which was a lot like a LeapPad, and used the same processor as the SEGA Mega Drive. It did sell in North America and Europe, but only for an unsuccessful four years before being discontinued. Apparently it has a regular PS/2 connector (Indonesian, translated) and works just fine as a computer input.

I don’t know what kind of  switches this thing has, but I would love to find out. It looks fun to type on, at least. And I don’t just mean because of the colors. Those keycaps remind me of that 80s square gum with the goo inside. Freshen Up.

Finally, a Keyboard for Writers

So this floaty mechanical keyboard is the latest offering from Astrohaus, who rose to fame with their AlphaSmart NEO-like device called the Freewrite, which apparently I disliked enough to never even cover. Why bother with that when you have OG NEOs lying around? Also, those Freewrite things are pricey for what they are, and I’ve seen plenty of writer decks on Hackaday to believe that I could build my own if I wanted.

Much like the Freewrite, the Wordrunner is aimed squarely at writers. And how do we feel about it? Well, as much as I love my Kinesis Advantage, it sure doesn’t have an electromechanical word counter or a sprint timer built into it like this one does.

It looks white, but the body is all metal and feels great according to Tom’s Hardware. All Wordrunners will ship with Kailh box browns and are not hot-swappable. Well, I suppose these are for writers and not necessarily keyboard enthusiasts. Perhaps the most interesting bit is that the F keys are replaced by common writerly actions, and there are a couple of programmable macro keys on top of those.

If there’s one thing writers love, it’s watching that word count go up. I can imagine how awesome it would be to watch it spin the faster you type, although that might trigger an urge to write nonsense. But sometimes great things come from such brainstorms.

Of course I don’t love that the Wordrunner is a standard TKL rectangle, but you gotta start somewhere, I suppose. Maybe they’ll make an ergonomic one someday. Like the other products under the Astrohaus/Freewrite umbrella, this one will launch on Kickstarter. Who knows how much it will be, probably at least $200, but you can reserve one for a refundable $1 ahead of time.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.