3D Printing A Macro Pad, Switches And All

July 9, 2020 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Building a macro pad inside of a 3D printed enclosure is hardly news these days. Neither is adding 3D printed keycaps to the mix. But if you go as far as [James Stanley] has, and actually print the switches themselves, we’ve got to admit that’s another story entirely.

Now you might be wondering how [James] managed to print a mechanical keyboard switch that’s the size of your garden variety Cherry. Well, the simple answer is that he didn’t. While his printed switches have the same footprint as traditional switches, they are twice as tall.

The switches could probably made much smaller if it wasn’t for the printed spring, but using a “real” one would defeat the purpose. Though we do wonder if the mechanical design could be simplified by making it an optical switch.

But can printed switches really stand up to daily use? [James] wondered the same thing, so he built a testing rig that would hit the switches and count how many iterations before they stopped working. This testing seems to indicate that the keys will either fail quickly due to some mechanical defect, or last for hundreds of thousands of presses. So assuming you weed out the duds early, you should be in pretty good shape.

Naturally, there are a few bits of copper inside each printed switch to act as the actual contacts. But beyond that, all you need to build one of these printable pads yourself is a USB-HID capable microcontroller like the Arduino Pro Micro. If you used the ESP32, you could even make it Bluetooth.

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Inputs Of Interest: X-Bows Ergo-Mechanical Keyboard

July 2, 2020 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Okay, let’s just get this out of the way up front, shall we? This ergonomic mechanical keyboard was a free sample offered to me by X-Bows. They contacted me after I expressed interest in trying one in the comments of my post about the Kinesis Advantage. I had my doubts about this keyboard as far as my own personal ergonomic needs go, which are admittedly on the extreme side. TL;DR: I won’t be abandoning my curvy girls anytime soon. But I will say that I’m definitely impressed by the X-Bows.

X-Bows was founded by a doctor who saw a lot of RSI issues in programmers and writers and decided to take matters into his own hands. The keyboard was born on Kickstarter in 2017 and now comes in three models. They sent me the mid-range model called The Knight, which retails for $249, but seems to be on permanent sale for $199. The top-of-the-line Knight Plus has a magnetic, detachable 10-key that can attach to either side. Continue reading “Inputs Of Interest: X-Bows Ergo-Mechanical Keyboard” →

Vintage Keyboard Gets The QMK Treatment

June 19, 2020 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

While nobody could deny that computing technology has some a long way in the last few decades, there are many out there who believe peak keyboard was sometime before the turn of the new millennium. They prefer the look, feel, and especially the sounds, of those classic keyboards to what passes for an input device these days. So much so that it’s not uncommon to see one of these old mammoths get freshened up and pushed into service with a modern computer.

Which is exactly what [Juan Pablo Kutianski] has done with his Compaq MX-11800. This keyboard, which is actually a branded version of the Cherry G80-11800, really stands out in a crowd. With an integrated trackball and a two-row arrangement for the function keys, it’s not hard to see why he’d want to show it off. But while the hardware itself was solid, the features and capabilities of this old school keyboard left something to be desired.

The solution was to replace the keyboard’s original electronics with a Teensy++2.0 running the popular QMK firmware. This not only made the keyboard USB, but allowed [Juan] to tweak things such as the trackball sensitivity and add in support for layers and macros. All of which can be managed through VIA, a graphical configuration tool for QMK.

As we’ve seen in so many projects, the combination of QMK running on the Teensy is a powerful tool for getting the most out of your keyboard. Whether breathing new life into a vintage piece of hardware or creating something truly custom like our very own [Kristina Panos] recently did, it’s definitely something to keep in mind if you’re considering any keyboard hacking.

Inputs Of Interest: Curves Are The Key To My Type

June 18, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

While I may have fallen in love aesthetically with the ErgoDox I built, beauty is only skin deep. And that’s funny, because you can see right through it. But the thing is, it’s just too big and knife-edged to be my daily driver. I keep missing the space bar and thumb-thumping the acrylic wasteland between the thumb cluster and the mainland.

The point was to make a nice portable keeb, even though all my trips for he foreseeable future are going to be limited to the bed or the couch. But it has to be comfortable, and the ErgoDox in its present state simply is not long-term comfortable. I’d take it over a rectangle any day, but it would probably end up being a half day.

Ergo isn’t so much a preference for me as it is a necessity at this point. I feel like I can honestly say that I might not be typing these words to you now if it weren’t for the Kinesis. I don’t want my fingers to do unnecessary legwork, or downgrade from the quality of typing life that concave keys have afforded me. So let me just say that using the ErgoDox made me want to build a dactyl even more than before.

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Hackaday Prize And UCPLA Are Driving Assistive Technology Forward

June 3, 2020 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Take a second to imagine all the people in your life. Your family, friends, coworkers. Your buddies down at the hackerspace, and anyone you chat with on IO and over the airwaves. Statistically speaking, one in four of these people has a disability of some kind, and needs help doing everyday things that you might not think twice about — simple things like opening doors or interacting with computers. Or maybe that one in four is you.

For the past 75 years, United Cerebral Palsy of LA (UCPLA) have been helping people with various developmental and intellectual disabilities to live independently with dignity. They work directly with members of the disabled community to develop assistive technology that is both affordable and dependable. UCPLA helps the disabled community with everything from employment to providing a creative outlet, and gives them the tools to do these things and more. Their mission is to help people be as independent as possible so they can feel good about themselves and enjoy a life without limits.

The people behind this non-profit are all about inclusion, access, and opportunity, and this is why we are proud to partner with UCPLA for the 2020 Hackaday Prize. With the world in upheaval, there is no better time to build a better future for everyone. You never know when you might need assistive technology. In addition to the open challenge that calls for everyone to work on a design, this year there is also a Dream Team challenge which offers a $3,000 per month stipend over the next two months to work on a team addressing one specific challenge. Apply for that asap!

What kind of challenges has UCPLA outlined for the Hackaday Prize? Let’s dive in and find out, and we’ll also hear from the UCPLA team in a Q&A video at the end of the article.

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Inputs Of Interest: ErgoDox Post-Mortem

June 2, 2020 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

In the last installment, I told you I was building an open-source, split, ortholinear keyboard called the ErgoDox. I’m doing this because although I totally love my Kinesis Advantage, it has made me want to crack my knuckles and explore the world of split keyboards. Apparently there are several of you who want to do the same, as evidenced by your interest in the I’m Building an ErgoDox! project on IO. Thank you!

Well boys and girls, the dust has settled, the soldering iron has cooled, and the keycaps are in place. The ErgoDox is built and working. Now that it’s all said and done, let me tell you how it went. Spoiler alert: not great. But I got through it, and it keyboards just like it’s supposed to. I’m gonna lay this journey out as it happened, step by step, so you can live vicariously through my experience.

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A Tasty Output Device

May 30, 2020 by Al Williams 11 Comments

We have headphones for your ears, and monitors for your eyes. Some computers even have tactile feedback. Now researchers have an output device for taste. The decidedly odd device uses five gels, one for each of the tastes humans can sense. If we understand the paper, the trick is that ionizing the gels inhibits the taste of that gel. By controlling the ionization level of each gel, you can synthesize any taste, just like you can make colors with three LEDs.

The five gels are made from agar and glycine (sweet), magnesium chloride (bitter), citric acid (acidic), salt (salty), and glutamic sodium (umami). If you didn’t learn about umami in school, that’s a savory taste likened to the taste of a broth or meat and often associated with monosodium glutamate.

The shape of the device is made like a sushi roll so that while the gels contact the tongue, a copper foil cathode can connect also. Using this will make you look even stranger than someone wearing Google Glass, but that’s the price of being on the cutting edge of technology, we suppose. There doesn’t seem to be any reason you couldn’t duplicate something like this, although we wonder about the hygiene of passing it around at parties. Maybe your next home movie could show a meal and let the viewer taste it too.

If you are wondering about smell, that’s another set of researchers. You would think this is the first taste output device we have seen, but no… surprisingly, it isn’t.

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