A Trackball So Good You Can’t Buy It

November 21, 2021 by Jenny List 21 Comments

The projects we feature on Hackaday are built to all standards, and we’d have to admit that things have left our own benches as bundles of wire and tape. Sometimes we see projects built to such a high standard that we’re shocked that they aren’t a high-end manufactured product, such as [jfedor2]’s two-ball trackball project. It combines a pair of billiard balls and a couple of buttons with a beautifully-designed 3D-printed case that looks for all the world as though it came from a premium peripheral brand.

Inside are a pair of PMW3360 optical sensors on PCBs mounted with a view into the billiard ball sockets, and for which the brains come courtesy of an RP2040 microcontroller. There are five PCBs in all, each having a set of purpose-built stand-offs to hold it. The result appears to be about as good a trackball as you’d hope to buy, except of course that you can’t. All the files to make your own are in the GitHub repository though, so all is not lost.

Over the years we’ve brought you a variety of trackball designs, including at least one other build using a billiard ball.

Making Your Own Touchpad With PWM And Rust

November 16, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 9 Comments

The modern touchpads are incredible feats of engineering, with everything from complex signal processing for noise and tremendous economies of scale driving prices low. So [Kevin] decided to see if he could make his own touchpad. Partially out of curiosity of what makes one touchpad better than another, but also because he was curious if he could. Using an STM32 and a custom PCB, he was off to the races in an incredibly cost-effective way.

After writing some quick firmware in Rust, he was reporting the values read by the PWM channels. Using python, he could get a good idea of the raw values that were being written over USB and visualized. So rather than implement filtering in hardware or firmware, he elected to do the filtering and processing on the host computer side in Python. We suspect this gave him much shorter iteration cycles.

If you like the idea of making your own touchpad but perhaps are dreaming a little bigger, why not make a tablecloth-sized touchpad?

Low-Cost Computer Gesture Control With An I2C Sensor

November 12, 2021 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Controlling your computer with a wave of the hand seems like something from science fiction, and for good reason. From Minority Report to Iron Man, we’ve seen plenty of famous actors controlling their high-tech computer systems by wildly gesticulating in the air. Meanwhile, we’re all stuck using keyboards and mice like a bunch of chumps.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. As [Norbert Zare] demonstrates in his latest project, you can actually achieve some fairly impressive gesture control on your computer using a $10 USD PAJ7620U2 sensor. Well not just the sensor, of course. You need some way to convert the output from the I2C-enabled sensor into something your computer will understand, which is where the microcontroller comes in.

Looking through the provided source code, you can see just how easy it is to talk to the PAJ7620U2. With nothing more exotic than a switch case statement, [Norbert] is able to pick up on the gesture flags coming from the sensor. From there, it’s just a matter of using the Arduino Keyboard library to fire off the appropriate keycodes. If you’re looking to recreate this we’d go with a microcontroller that supports native USB, but technically this could be done on pretty much any Arduino. In fact, in this case he’s actually using the ATtiny85-based Digispark.

This actually isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody use a similar sensor to pull off low-cost gesture control, but so far, none of these projects have really taken off. It seems like it works well enough in the video after the break, but looks can be deceiving. Have any Hackaday readers actually tried to use one of these modules for their day-to-day futuristic computing?

Continue reading “Low-Cost Computer Gesture Control With An I2C Sensor” →

A monoblock split keyboard with the all-important num pad.

Back-to-the-Office Ergo Brings A Bit Of Home Sweet Home

November 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

We sure do love a good one-piece split keyboard, and it’s not just because you never have to worry about the halves drifting too far apart throughout the day, though that’s a big plus. For one thing, the angles are always just right without having to mess with anything, so muscle memory gets you back to the home row every time. Usually, the only thing missing from these mono-block splits is the num pad. Well, not on the SuperLyra.

This is [Malevolti]’s back-to-the-office build, and it’s sure to start a few conversations. While we don’t have a lot of details, there will be plenty forthcoming on the Black Cat Plasticworks website. As soon as next year, [Malevolti] plans to sell fully-assembled SuperLyras, kits, and bare-bones PCBs. We really appreciate that it allows for either MX-type switches or Chocs, depending on the hot swap sockets installed.

As much as we love the Maltron-esque num pad in the middle, we imagine that it would be more comfortable to use if it were canted at 45° angle relative to the user’s dominant hand. Fortunately, some enterprising redditor had the same idea. They’ve already mocked this up in Photoshop and are inviting comments on another thread.

Want to go split, but don’t know which is right for you? Check out this Split Keyboard Finder.

A Hackable Keyboard That Even Has Screens

October 30, 2021 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

There are a huge number of available keyboards out in the world these days, catering to all of the plainest and the most advanced desires. However, if you want something that’s just right, sometimes it pays to build your own. [Zach] did just that.

One of the key features of [Zach]’s build is that it diverges away from the Cherry MX switch form factor. The design uses low-profile switches instead, which help with keeping the keyboard low enough to avoid it causing wrist problems. The keyboard also uses IO expanders to hook up all the key switches, helping to reduce the incidence of ghost keys. The board can also be split in half, allowing it to be repurposed as a smaller macropad when desired.

It’s all wrapped up in a cool 3D printed case, and there are even three OLED displays on the right-hand side. They’re soldered to the PCB on special cutouts that allow the displays to flex and trigger tactile switches, acting as giant pressable buttons.

[Zach] does a great job explaining all the nifty engineering decisions he made to cram maximum functionality into the design. We’ve seen some other great DIY ergonomic designs too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “A Hackable Keyboard That Even Has Screens” →

Finally, an ortho split keyboard with two Enter keys.

All Aboard! The Railroad Keyboard Is Now Serving Open Sourceville

October 29, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it, and that goes for keyboard designs as much as it does the dessert cart. The Railroad is [DiplomacyPunIn10Did]’s first keyboard design, believe it or not. And, well, we like what we see. Good thing it’s open-source, eh?

While we personally don’t normally go for straight-up ortholinear keyboards, this one looks split enough to be comfortable. We love that there is both an ISO Enter and a regular-sized Return, although we might put another Enter on the left side if it were our keyboard. That’s the beauty of this whole open-source keyboard thing, though. I could assign any number of those animal-capped keys to Enter. Another plus is that The Railroad uses semi-normal keycap sets, with none of this 1.25u nonsense of certain split keyboards.

All the files and the BOM are available on GitHub under a Creative Commons license. This represents JLCPCB’s max length, by the way. [DiplomacyPunIn10Did] wanted to add a num pad, but it would have made it too long. Since the pictures are so big, we put our hands up to the screen to test it out. Those innermost 1u thumb keys look like they’re placed just far enough in toward the space bars that they wouldn’t cause strain, but it’s hard to know for sure without trying a real one. (Darn you, global shortages and shipping delays!)

Yep, there are all kinds of ways to make a keyboard your own. We’ve even seen an all-wood keyboard that uses Scrabble tiles for keycaps.

A sandbox for ergonomic keyboard makers.

Dactyl Chimera Leaves The Learning Out Of The Curve

October 24, 2021 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

Have you been wanting to build your own keyboard, ergonomic or otherwise, but are hesitant to spend all that time and filament on something that may not be a good fit for your hands? Glad as we are that the dactyl is open-source, to get in there and really mess around with it requires intimate knowledge of either OpenSCAD or Clojure.

Well, not anymore. [WolfIcefang]’s dactyl chimera is an ergo sandbox, a test bench for column curvature, stagger, and height that should keep you from having to iterate all day and night. It was designed in FreeCAD and has three parts — the rack, the tenting foot, and the arches. The rack acts like a bottom plate and has slots for holding the columns (arches) in place. Underneath that is the tenting foot, which changes the lateral inclination. Thirdly are the arches, the business part where the switches go.

[WolfIcefang] says it’s sturdy but not portable, and for some reason feels the need to apologize for the looks. We think it’s beautiful, but then again are easily captivated by such practicality. It’s not quite a keyboard yet, as [WolfIcefang] has neither wired it up nor burned in any firmware. This is still in the early stages, and [WolfIcefang] wants to open it up to collaborators. Plans for the future include interchangeable thumb clusters and a complete build guide.

Even if you aren’t that fluent in OpenSCAD, you’ll have fun messing around on the keycap modeling playground.

Via r/ErgoMechKeyboards