But sir, it is wafer-thin. That’s how they get you! Just when you couldn’t possibly justify building another keyboard, let alone owning one, along comes the Kambala by [aroum2].
Image by [aroum2] via redditNow, ‘Kambala’ means a few things, but here it refers to fish, as evidenced by logo and matching themed PCB key chain shown in the gallery.
This catch is so flat because of the switches: PG1316S, and 42 of them. These are better known to some as Kailh butterfly switches, and are meant for laptops. But, this is Hackaday.
No matter what you call them, those switches are controlled by a nice!nano V2-compatible controller, which allows for ZMK firmware support. There’s a 110 mAh battery and four status LEDs, and best of all, the charging indicator is in the fish’s eyes.
[aroum2] might share the files later. Here’s hoping!
An early print of the linoleum block that Kristina started carving during the podcast. (It’s the original Cherry MX patent drawing, re-imagined for block printing.)
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, we’ve launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!
On What’s That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Konrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi’s steam heat radiator pinging away.
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you’d find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.
We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Curious about split keyboards, but overwhelmed by the myriad options for every little thing? You should start with [thehaikuza]’s excellent Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards.
Image by [thehaikuza] via redditYour education begins with the why, so you can skip that if you must, but the visuals are a nice refresher on that front.
He then gets into the types of keyboards — you got your standard row-staggered rectangles that we all grew up on, column-staggered, and straight-up ortholinear, which no longer enjoy the popularity they once did.
At this point, the guide becomes a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you want a split but don’t want to learn to change much if at all about your typing style, keep reading, because there are definitely options.
But if you’re ready to commit to typing correctly for the sake of ergonomics, you can skip the Alice and other baby ergo choices and get your membership to the light side. First are features — you must decide what you need to get various jobs done. Then you learn a bit about key map customization, including using a non-QWERTY layout. Finally, there’s the question of buying versus DIYing. All the choices are yours, so go for it!
Personally, I love a monoblock or uni-body split. You’ll pry this Kinesis Advantage from under my cold, dead hands. But on the go, I really like the Glove 80, a true split that can be completely wireless in case you want to put the halves really far apart.
Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit[thehaikuza] is the opposite, preferring a full split at the desk, but finding it troublesome when using it on the couch or at a cafe or co-working space, and so created dǎ bāo (打包) — a uni-body split that can also be a distant split. And this best-of-both worlds creation is remarkably [thehaikuza]’s first keyboard.
The name means to take out food, and if you click the picture you can see a cute little take-out container on the silkscreen of the right half. Directly below it, there’s a track point nubbin to be used with the thumb.
It does its split-in-half trick via a magnetic four-pin connector for when you want the halves stuck together. When the halves are separated, they can instead talk over a USB-C cable. One half has the microcontroller, and the other has a GPIO expander.
Isn’t this glorious? If you don’t recognize what this is right away (or from the post title), it’s an AlphaSmart NEO word processor, repackaged in a 3D-printed typewriter-esque shell, meticulously designed by the renowned [Un Kyu Lee] of Micro Journal fame.
Assembly looks easy enough; there’s no soldering, but you do have to disconnect and reconnect the fiddly ribbon cables. After that, it’s just screws.
This design happened by accident. A friend named [Hook] who happens to manage the AlphaSmart Flickr community had given [Un Kyu Lee] a NEO2 to try out, but before he could, it fell from a shelf and the enclosure suffered a nasty hole near the screen. But the internals seemed fine, so he got the idea to design a new enclosure.
I don’t believe the knobs do anything, but they sure do look nice. There’s an area along the top where you can clip a light, since the NEO has no backlight. There are also two smaller slots on the sides if your light won’t clip to the top.
I’d really like to do this to one of my NEOs. I have two NEO regulars, but reviewers on Tindie report that it works just as well with those as the NEO2.
Let’s face it; remembering a bunch of passwords is the pits, and it’s just getting worse as time goes on. These days, you really ought to have a securely-generated key-smash password for everything. And at that point you need a password manager, but you still have to remember the password for that.
Well, Motorola is sympathetic to this problem, or at least they were in 2013 when they came up with the password pill. Motorola Mobility, who were owned by Google at the time, debuted it at the All Things Digital D11 tech conference in California. This was a future that hasn’t come to pass, for better or worse, but it was a fun thought experiment in near-futurism.
Now, we can’t call these LEGO key caps for obvious reasons, but also because they don’t actually work with standard LEGO. But that’s just fine and dandy, because they’re height-adjustable key caps that use the building block principle.
Image by [paper5963] via redditNow you could just as easily build wells as the dome shape pictured here, and I’d really like to see that one of these days.
In the caption of the gallery, [paper5963] mentions foam. As far as I’ve studied the pictures, it seems to be all 3D-printed material. If they were foam, they would likely be porous and would attract and hold all kinds of nastiness. Right?
[paper5963] says that there are various parts that add on to these, not just flat tops. There are slopes and curves, too. They are also designing these for narrow pitch, and say they are planning to release the files. Exciting!
