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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SpaceMouse Destroyed For Science

April 16, 2025 by Fenix Guthrie 33 Comments

The SpaceMouse is an interesting gadget beloved by engineers and artists alike. They function almost like joysticks, but with six degrees of freedom (6DoF). This can make them feel a bit like magic, which is why [Thought Bomb Design] decided to tear one apart and figure out how it works.

The movement mechanism ended up being relatively simple; three springs soldered between two PCBs with one PCB being fixed to the base and the other moving in space. Instead of using a potentiometer or even hall effect sensor as you might expect from a joystick, the space mouse contained a set of six LEDs and light meters.

The sensing array came nestled inside a dark box made of PCBs. An injection molded plastic piece with slits would move to interrupt the light coming from the LEDs. The mouse uses the varying values coming from the light meter to decode Cartesian motion of the space mouse. It’s very simple and a bit hacky, just how we like it.

Looking for a similar input device, but want to take the DIY route? We’ve seen a few homebrew versions of this concept that might provide you with the necessary inspiration.

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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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A Mouse, No Hands!

April 11, 2025 by Jenny List 11 Comments

There are some ideas which someone somewhere has to try. Take [Uri Tuchman]’s foot mouse. It’s a computer mouse for foot operation, but it’s not just a functional block. Instead it’s an ornate inlaid-wood-and-brass affair in the style of a very fancy piece of antique footwear.

The innards of an ordinary USB mouse are placed in something best described as a wooden platform heel, upon which is placed a brass sole with a couple of sections at the front to activate the buttons with the user’s toes. The standout feature is the decoration. With engraving on the brass and inlaid marquetry on the wood, it definitely doesn’t look like any computer peripheral we’ve seen.

The build video is below the break, and we’re treated to all the processes sped up. At the end he uses it in a basic art package and in a piloting game, with varying degrees of succes. We’re guessing it would take a lot of practice to gain a level of dexterity with this thing, but we salute him for being the one who tries it.

This has to be the fanciest peripheral we’ve ever seen, but surprisingly it’s not the first foot mouse we’ve brought you.

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Better Bearings Take The Wobble Out Of Premium Scroll Wheel

April 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t exactly what the firmware between our ears was tuned to do. We’re supposed to be hunting and gathering, not hunting and pecking. So anything that makes the computing experience a little more pleasurable is probably worth the effort, and this premium wireless scroll wheel certainly seems to fit that bill.

If this input device seems familiar, that’s because we featured [Engineer Bo]’s first take on this back at the end of 2024. That version took a lot of work to get right, and while it delivered high-resolution scrolling with a premium look and feel, [Bo] just wasn’t quite satisfied with the results. There were also a few minor quibbles, such as making the power switch a little more user-friendly and optimizing battery life, but the main problem was the one that we admit would have driven us crazy, too: the wobbling scroll wheel.

[Bo]’s first approach to the wobble problem was to fit a larger diameter bearing under the scroll wheel. That worked, but at the expense of eliminating the satisfying fidget-spinner action of the original — not acceptable. Different bearings yielded the same result until [Bo] hit on the perfect solution: a large-diameter ceramic bearing that eliminated the wobble while delivering the tactile flywheel experience.

The larger bearing left more room inside for the redesigned PCB and a lower-profile, machined aluminum wheel. [Bo] also had a polycarbonate wheel made, which looks great as is but would really be cool with internal LEDs — at the cost of battery life, of course. He’s also got plans for a wheel machined from wood, which we’ll eagerly await.

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