A Japanese-input macro pad with a display and color-coded light-up keys.

Introducing The KanaChord Plus Keyboard カナコード・プラス・キーボード

October 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

We love to watch your projects grow as much as you do. Really, we’re like proud grandparents around here. So it’s great to see that [Mac Cody] is back with the KanaChord Plus Keyboard, which supports an astounding 6,165 Kanji as well as 6,240 of the most common Japanese words that contain Kanji. This is all in addition to supporting the Kana characters, which make up the rest of Japanese writing (more on that in a minute).

If you need to input Japanese, this is a dream come true. If you’re trying to learn Japanese in the first place, this could be exactly what you need to become fluent.

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Harmonic Table Keyboard Brings Old Idea Back To Life

June 17, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

If you missed the introduction of the Axis-49 and Axis-64 keyboards by C-Thru Music, you’re definitely not alone. At the time it was a new musical instrument that was based on the harmonic table, but it launched during the Great Recession and due to its nontraditional nature and poor timing, the company went out of business. But the harmonic table layout has a number advantages for musicians over other keyboard layouts, so [Ben] has brought his own version of the unique instrument to life in his latest project.

Called the Midihex, the keyboard has a number of improvements over the version from C-Thru Music, most obviously its much larger 98 playable keys and five function keys. The keys themselves are similar to Cherry MX keys but which use Hall-effect sensors. This style of key allows the device to send continuous key position information to the host computer, and since this is a MIDI instrument, this capability allows it to support a MIDI protocol called MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) which allows each note to be more finely controlled by the musician than a standard MIDI instrument. The PCB is powered by a Teensy 4.1 at the core.

For any musicians that haven’t tried out a harmonic table before, an instrument like this might be worth trying out. The layout provides easier chord and scale patterns, and for beginner musicians it can have a much shallower learning curve than other types of instruments. If you can’t find an original Axis-49 or Axis-64 anywhere to try out, though, we actually posted a teardown of one way back in 2009 when the company was still producing instruments.

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KanaChord Is A Macro Pad For Japanese Input

April 8, 2024 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

There are various situations that warrant additional keyboards on your desk, and inputting a second language is definitely a good one. That’s the idea behind KanaChord, which generates Unicode macros to render Japanese Kana characters using chords — pressing multiple keys at once as you would on a piano.

The Japanese writing system is made up of Kanji (Chinese characters), Hirigana, and Katakana. Without going into it too much, just know that Hirigana and Katakana are collectively known as the Kana, and there’s a table that lays out the pairing of vowels and consonants. To [Mac Cody], the layout of the Kana table inspired this chording keyboard.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: Sleek Macro Pad Makes 2FA A Little Easier

June 20, 2023 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

We all know the drill when it comes to online security — something you know, and something you have. But when the “something you have” is a two-factor token in a keyfob at the bottom of a backpack, or an app on your phone that’s buried several swipes and taps deep, inconvenience can stand in the way of adding that second level of security. Thankfully, this “2FA Sidecar” is the perfect way to lower the barrier to using two-factor authentication.

That’s especially true for a heavy 2FA user like [Matt Perkins], who typically needs to log in and out of multiple 2FA-protected networks during his workday. His Sidecar is similar in design to many of the macro pads we’ve seen, with a row of Cherry MX key switches, a tiny TFT display — part of an ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather — and a USB HID interface. Pressing one of the five keys on the pad generates a new time-based one-time password (TOTP) and sends it over USB as typed keyboard characters; the TOTP is also displayed on the TFT if you prefer to type it in yourself.

As for security, [Matt] took pains to keep things as tight as possible. The ESP32 only connects to network services to keep the time synced up for proper TOTP generation, and to serve up a simple web configuration page so that you can type in the TOTP salts and service name to associate with each key. He also discusses the possibility of protecting the ESP32’s flash memory by burning the e-fuses, as well as the pros and cons of that maneuver. The video below shows the finished project in action.

This is definitely a “use at your own risk” proposition, but we tend to think that in the right physical environment, anything that makes 2FA more convenient is probably a security win. If you need to brush up on the risks and benefits of 2FA, you should probably start here.

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Custom Calculator Brings Us Back To The 70s

September 1, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

There are certain design aesthetics from every era that manage to survive the fads of their time and live throughout history. Ancient Greek architecture is still drawn upon for design inspiration in modern buildings, the mid-century modern style from the 60s still inspires various designs of consumer goods, and the rounded, clean looking cars from the 90s are still highly desirable qualities in automotive design. For electronics, though, we like this 70s-inspired calculator that [Aaron] recently built.

The calculator hearkens back to the days of calculators like the HP-29C with its large buttons and dot-matrix display. [Aaron] built the case out of various woods with a screen angled towards the user, and it uses a LCD display similar to those found in antique calculators. The brain of the calculator is an Arduino which fits easily into the case, and [Aaron] also built the keyboard from scratch with Cherry MX-style mechanical keys soldered together into a custom shape.

The software to run the calculator is fairly straightforward, but we are most impressed with the woodworking, styling, and keyboard design in this build. [Aaron] is also still ironing out some bugs with the power supply as it uses a DC-DC converter to power the device from a single lithium battery. For those who are more fond of early 2000s graphing calculators instead, be sure to take a look at this graphing calculator arcade cabinet.

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Faux-Retro “Tape” Player Runs On ESP32 And 80s Vibes

June 23, 2022 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

At first glance, this gorgeous retro-styled audio player built by [Max Kern] could absolutely pass for the genuine article. But then you take a closer look and realize that the “tape” it’s playing is actually an animation running on a 320 x 240 IPS display, and the Play and Rewind buttons on the front aren’t the chunky electromechanical affairs of yesteryear but actually cleverly repurposed MX keyboard switches.

By now you’re probably realizing that this player is quite a bit smaller than you first imagined, which in turn, means that it even its case is a modern fabrication. While it might perfectly encapsulate the look and feel of a piece of 1980s consumer electronics, it was squirted out on a thoroughly modern desktop 3D printer.

Even so, [Max] made sure to include draft angles in the CAD design and and a distinctive separation line so the case looked like it was injection molded. Following similar logic, he decided against using a modern rechargeable battery pack to power the electronics, opting instead for a more era-appropriate set of AA batteries.

In terms of hardware, the custom PCB is home to an ESP32 WROOM, a MAX98357A I2S audio amplifier, a FT231XS USB-to-serial chip, with enough passives and regulators to keep them all well fed and happy. The ESP32 has more than enough computational horsepower to chew through MP3 files, which are conveniently loaded via an SD slot built into the side of the player. As the player was actually intended for audio books, onboard playback is limited to a mono speaker; though there is a 3.5 mm audio jack to plug in a pair of headphones for when the built-in speaker isn’t up to the task.

Check out the video after the break to see how the player is assembled, as well as a demonstration of its simple three-button user interface. It looks like a joy to use, though the lack of fast forward and rewind sound effects took us a bit by surprise given the otherwise impeccable attention to detail. We’ll assume there’s some technical limitation that makes this particularly difficult to implement, and that their absence is currently keeping [Max] up at night.

As impressive as the final product is, we can’t say it’s a surprise. Frankly, we wouldn’t expect anything less from [Max] at this point. His adaptive OLED macro pad wowed us back in 2020, and his ZeroBot is still one of the slickest designs for a DIY two-wheeled robots we’ve ever seen.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Grabbity Gloves

September 21, 2021 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

I keep saying I need to stay away from auction sites, but then I wouldn’t have as much fodder for Hackaday, would I? As I write this, I’m waiting on a Dell AT101W, which will be my first keeb with Alps switches. Well, hopefully it has Alps SKCM salmon or black switches — according to Deskthority, it might have rubber domes. If it doesn’t keyboard, I will probably salvage the switches and build something more ergonomic. Either way, I’m thinking we need a post about Alps switches, because some people think they’re even better than Cherry MX switches.

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