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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Bobblehead

May 5, 2025 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

No, see, it’s what’s inside that counts. Believe it or not, [nobutternoparm] retrofitted this innocent, adorable little tikes® so-called “Kidboard” rubber-dome keyboard into a mechanical marvel. Yeah! No, it wasn’t exactly pure, unadulterated fun, nor was it easy to do. But then again nothing worth doing ever is.

A Little Tikes keyboard, retrofitted with a custom mechanical keyboard. — Image by [nobutternoparm] via reddit

For one thing, the PCB ended up being a bit too wide, so the bottom half of the case is a bit mangled. But that’s okay! Onward and upward.

Next problem: a real PCB and mechanical switches (Gateron Baby Kangaroos) are a lot taller than the previous arrangement. This required spacers, a mounting plate, and longer screws to hold it all together. Now imagine lining all that up and trying to keep it that way during assembly.

And then there’s the keycaps. Guess what? They’re non-standard because they’re for rubber domes. So this meant more adapters and spacers. You’ll see in the gallery.

So we know it looks great, but how does it type? Well… [nobutternoparm] gives the feel a 4/10. The keycaps now have too many points of contact, so they bind up and have to be mashed down. But it’s going to be a great conversation piece.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Protractor Keyboard

April 29, 2025 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Don’t you love it when the title track is the first one on the album? I had to single out this adjustable keyboard called the Protractor, because look at it! The whole thing moves, you know. Go look at the gallery.

The Protractor, an adjustable monoblock split keyboard with sliding angles. — Image by [BFB_Workshop] via reddit

If you use a true split, even if you never leave the house, you know the pain of losing the good angle and/or separation you had going on for whatever reason. Not only does this monoblock split solve that simply by being a monoblock split, you can always find the right angle you had via the built-in angle finder.

[BFB_Workshop] used a nice!nano v2, but you could use any ZMK-supported board with the same dimensions. This 5 x 12 has 60 Gateron KS-33 switches, which it was made for, and has custom keycaps. You can, of course, see all the nice, neat ribbon cable wiring through the clear PLA, which is a really great touch.

This bad boy is flat enough that you can use the table as your palm rest. To me, that doesn’t sound so comfortable, but then again, I like key wells and such. I’d still love to try a Protractor, because it looks quite interesting to type on. If you want to build one, the files and instructions are available on Printables.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Part Picker

April 21, 2025 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

If you do a lot of 3D computer work, I hear a Spacemouse is indispensable. So why not build a keyboard around it and make it a mouse-cropad?

A Spacemouse with an arcing keyboard built around it. — Image by [DethKlawMiniatures] via reddit

That’s exactly what [DethKlawMiniatures] did with theirs. This baby is built with mild steel for the frame, along with some 3D-printed spacers and a pocket for the Spacemouse itself to live in.

Those switches are Kailh speed coppers, and they’re all wired up to a Seeed Xiao RP2040. [DethKlawMiniatures] says that making that lovely PCB by hand was a huge hassle, but impatience took over.

After a bit of use, [DethKlawMiniatures] says that the radial curve of the macro pad is nice, and the learning curve was okay. I think this baby looks fantastic, and I hope [DethKlawMiniatures] gets a lot of productivity out of it.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With John Lennon’s Typewriter

April 15, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

The Clawtype, a one-handed number with a handy strap and a good-sized display. — Image by [akavel] via GitHub

Reader [akavel] was kind enough to notify me about Clawtype, which is a custom wearable chorded keyboard/mouse combo based on the Chordite by [John W. McKown].

First of all, I love the brass rails — they give it that lovely circuit sculpture vibe. This bad boy was written in Rust and currently runs on a SparkFun ProMicro RP2040 board. For the mouse portion of the program, there’s an MPU6050 gyro/accelerometer.

[akavel]’s intent was to pair it with XR glasses, which sounds like a great combination to me. While typing is still a bit slow, [akavel] is improving at a noticeable pace and does some vim coding during hobby time.

In the future, [akavel] plans to try a BLE version, maybe even running off a single AA Ni-MH cell, and probably using an nRF52840. As for the 3D-printed shape, that was designed and printed by [akavel]’s dear friend [Cunfusu], who has made the files available over at Printables. Be sure to check it out in the brief demo video after the break.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One Where We Embrace The Jank

April 7, 2025 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Yeah, yeah — not a keyboard. But one keyboard-adjacent topic I’m certainly interested in is that of finding a satisfying mouse. Why settle for ticky micro-switches when you could have full-on thock in both peripherals?

My own personal peripherals. Banana mat for scale.

I’ve been using a Logitech Ergo M575 for a couple of years now. As you can see, it’s a trackball with two extra buttons, which come programmed for forward and back. I find this next to useless, so I employed AutoHotKey and changed them to Ctrl+C on the up switch, and Ctrl+V on the down switch.

[Aknup] commented on the previous Keebin’ and brought up MMO mice, which, I didn’t know those things had a name other than maybe ‘multi-button mice’. And yes, there are a few trackball MMOs out there. I’ve got my eye on a couple already.

Does anyone have a trackball MMO? I hate to spend $100+ on something I won’t like. I’m intrigued that the one I found that’s the most attractive is less a thumb trackball and more a two-fingers-at-once kind of situation. That will take some getting used to, but the way my trackball moves sometimes, it could be a really positive change.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 315: Conductive String Theory, Decloudified Music Players, And Wild Printing Tech

April 4, 2025 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the (stupid, lousy) time zones to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

Again, no news is good news. On What’s That Sound, Kristina didn’t get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. If you think you can identify the sound amid all the talking, you could win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation when it comes to a pair of formerly-cloud music players. We take a look at a crazy keyboard hack, some even crazier conductive string, and a perfectly cromulent list of 70 DIY synths on one wild webpage. Finally, we rethink body art with LEDs, and take a look at a couple of printing techniques that are a hundred years or so apart in their invention.

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.

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Ditto That

April 3, 2025 by Kristina Panos 42 Comments

In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I guess, but if you don’t, keep reading.

Those often purple-inked papers were fresh from the ditto machine, or spirit duplicator. Legend has it that not only did they smell good when they were still wet, inhaling the volatile organic compounds within would make the sniffer just a little bit lightheaded. But the spirit duplicator didn’t use ghosts, it used either methanol (wood alcohol), isopropyl, or, if you were loaded, ethyl alcohol.

Invented in 1923 by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld, ditto machines were popular among schools, churches, and clubs for making copies of worksheets, fliers, and so on before the modern copy machine became widespread in the 1980s. Other early duplicating machines include the mimeograph, the hectograph, and the cyclostyle.

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