From the styling of this article’s title, some might assume that the Hackaday editors are asleep at the switch this fine day. While that might be true — it’s not our turn to watch them — others will recognize this tortured phrasing as one way to use the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language to describe a difficult technical project, such as [Attoparsec]’s enormous and enormously impractical ten-hundred word keyboard.
While the scale of this build is overwhelming enough, the fact that each key delivers a full word rather than a single character kind of throws the whole keyboard concept out the window. The 60×17 matrix supports the 1,000 most common English words along with 20 modifier keys, which allow a little bit of cheating on the 1-kiloword dictionary by letting you pluralize a word or turn it into an adjective or adverb. Added complexity comes from the practical limits of PCB fabrication, which forces the use of smaller (but still quite large) PCBs that are connected together. Luckily, [Attoparsec] was able to fit the whole thing on five identical PCBs, which were linked together with card-edge connectors.
The list of pain points on this six-month project is long, and the video below covers them all in detail. What really stood out to us, though, was the effort [Attoparsec] put into the keycaps. Rather than 3D printing his own, he used dye sublimation to label blank keycaps with the 1,000 words. That might sound simple, but he had to go through a lot of trial and error before getting a process that worked, and the results are quite nice. Another problem was keeping the key switches aligned while soldering, which was solved with a 3D printed jig. We also appreciate the custom case to keep this keyboard intact while traveling; we’re going to keep that build-your-own road case service in mind for future projects.
This mega-keyboard is a significant escalation from [Attoparsec]’s previous large keyboard project. The results are pretty ridiculous and impractical, but that’s just making us love it more. The abundance of tips and tricks for managing a physically expansive project are just icing on the cake.
First I thought it’d work for the precursor of modern Japanese or Chinese where they had thousands of pictograms for words, but then I realized it would also work for all the important but hard to see picture icons that can’t be spelled out anymore. Another use could be for all those yellow blobs and such that take the place of ideas.
If I did something with that many keys I’d make a microtonal keyboard.
This has to be a record…
Out here re-inventing the Chinese typewriter, English version.
Nice.
I have no words.
ah. i go the other way. less keys to get more room on my desk. looking at the image, he should consider that too.
it looks like he has the keys color coded by word type. and perhaps he gave some thought on where the most used words would go. having all the modifiers on one panel seems like it would be better distributed around on either side. il watch the video later when i have time.
Great video, fell asleep twice!
Yawn. What a boring stunt. Wake me up when the 10k words keyboard is ready.
i mean – it’s great for passwords 😂
Should be Keebin’ with Kristina article!!!
needs a voice activated flip up pannel, for a bunch of shorter words, often used, much less often writen. It would activate when a certain number of the words, under the pannel had been used.When a key is held down, it , just keeps pasting in another repeat, with of course comas, and appropriat spacing, and also the ability to cycle through those words, in a non repeating fashion, should several or all of the keys be pressed, followed by a pop up that says “are you sure you want to say that?” )( y?, n?)
I’m still waiting for the Unicode keyboard which has a button for every single Unicode symbol.
That’s easy.
You can do it with 22 physical keys…
A single “type the letter” key, and 21 different shift keys.
Just hold down the correct combination of shift keys and press the “type” button.
You probably want to check if it is a valid character though.
You could also do it with 17 keys if you want to input the Unicode in hex with a send key.
Or even 3 keys if you want to enter it in binary, with a send key.
…
Now I kinda want to make a keyboard with the full ASCII set…
Or maybe just the extended “art” set, with 8 or 16 “shift” keys for the basic colors.
If you’re going for minimalism, one key is all you need. Plus some good timing.
This could be Tom Scott’s Emoji Keyboard <3
Finally, a keyboard with an ‘any’ key!
“…Hackaday editors…”
(X) to doubt.
Are you REALLY trying to tell us that you are paying people to edit your blog?
Are you sure about that?
Are they…alive?
You should go check on them.
How do you explain the 10-15% of blog posts that have simple misspellings, broken grammar, entire sentence fragments, repeated words/phrases, and other mistakes that would easily be caught by any document editor?