Greatest Keycaps And Where To Find Them

April 28, 2020 by Kristina Panos 25 Comments

Look at your keyboard. Do the keycaps excite you? That’s what we thought. You pound on that thing day in and day out. Shouldn’t it at least be attractive? Or even happiness-inducing? You don’t necessarily have to replace every single keycap to spark joy. When it comes to artisan keycaps, the point is to have something that stands out.

How about an Escape key that looks like a tall stack of flapjacks or a tiny, intricate cream puff? From a practical standpoint, how about a spiky Escape key that makes you think twice about rage quitting?

If you’re into games or anime, chances are good that there are more than enough artisan keycaps out there to keep you cash-poor for a while. The same goes for scrumptious foodstuffs with Cherry MX-compatible stems.

In this day and age, you can get just about any type of keycap you want, especially those encapsulating pop culture phenomena and fads. Yes there’s a fidget spinner keycap, and it’s adorable.

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Custom Reddit Keyboard Only Needs One Hand

March 17, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Sometimes you might want to browse your favorite social media site while eating a sandwich, or throwing darts, or fending off an attacker with a sword. You know, normal things that might occupy only one of your hands. If you’ve ever found yourself in such a situation, then this custom Reddit keyboard could be for you.

Built by [jangxx], this little board is about as simple as it gets. Even if you aren’t looking for a way to browse /r/cooking while practicing your single-handed egg cracking technique, the same principles could be used to quickly throw together a macro keyboard for whatever your particular needs might be.

Inside the 3D printed enclosure is nothing more exotic than an Arduino Pro Micro and five Cherry MX Red switches. The switches have been wired directly to the GPIO pins on the Arduino, and a simple Sketch takes care of the rest. [jangxx] has written the code in such a way that you can easily define the mapping of USB HID keys to physical switches right at the top of the file, making it easy to reuse for your own purposes.

As simple as this project is, we really like the trouble that [jangxx] went through on the 3D printed key caps. The white up and down arrows allow you to navigate through the posts, and the center key selects the one you want to view. Since it’s for Reddit, naturally the red and blue buttons for rapid voting. When you want to go back to the list of posts, just hit the center button again.

Back in 2011 we saw a dedicated Reddit voting peripheral, but we think the addition of simple navigation keys makes this project a bit more compelling. Incidentally, if you can think of any other reason you might want a one-handed keyboard for browsing Reddit…we definitely don’t want to hear about it.

Optical Keyboards Have Us Examining Typing At Light Speed-ish

November 18, 2019 by Bob Baddeley 86 Comments

There’s a newish development in the world of keyboards; the optical switch. It’s been around for a couple years in desktop keyboards, and recently became available on a laptop keyboard as well. These are not replacements for your standard $7 keyboard with rubber membrane switches intended for puttering around on your raspberry pi. Their goal is the gamer market.

The question, though, is are these the equivalent of Monster Cables for audiophiles: overpriced status symbols? Betteridge would be proud; the short answer is that no, there is a legitimate advantage, and for certain types of use, it makes a lot of sense.

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Custom Game Pad Can Reprogram Itself

September 21, 2019 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

In the heat of the moment, gamers live and die by the speed and user-friendliness of their input mechanisms. If you’re team PC, you have two controllers to worry about. Lots of times, players will choose a separate gaming keyboard over the all-purpose 104-banger type.

When [John Silvia]’s beloved Fang game pad went to that LAN party in the sky, he saw the opportunity to create a custom replacement exactly as he wanted it. Also, he couldn’t find one with his desired layout. Mechanical switches were a must, and he went with those Cherry MX-like Gaterons we keep seeing lately.

This 37-key game pad, which [John] named Eyetooth in homage to the Fang, has a couple of standout features. For one, any key can be reprogrammed key directly from the keypad itself, thanks to built-in macro commands. It’s keyboard-ception!

One of the macros toggles an optional auto-repeat feature. [John] says this is not for cheating, though you could totally use it for that if you were so inclined. He is physically unable to spam keys fast enough to satisfy some single-player games, so he designed this as a workaround. The auto-repeat’s frequency is adjustable in 5-millisecond increments using the up /down macros. There’s a lot more information about the macros on the project’s GitHub.

Eyetooth runs on an Arduino Pro Micro, so you can either use [John]’s code or something like QMK firmware. This baby is so open source that [John] even has a hot tip for getting quality grippy feet on the cheap: go to the dollar store and look for rubber heel grippers meant to keep feet from sliding around inside shoes.

If [John] finds himself doing a lot of reprogramming, adding a screen with a layout map could help him keep track of the key assignments.

A Customizable Open Source Mechanical Numpad

May 13, 2019 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Mechanical keyboards with reduced key counts are all the rage these days, but while those streamlined input devices might look cool on your desk, there are times when the traditional number pad or navigation keys are quite handy. Rather than just going without, [Mattia Dal Ben] decided to put together his own mechanical auxiliary input device for when the main board just isn’t cutting it.

[Mattia] is calling his creation the YamPAD, which stands for Yet Another Mechanical numPAD. One of the major goals for the project is to produce a design that’s easy for others to replicate and customize. His PCB has a socket designed to fit an Arduino Pro Micro, which combined with the QMK firmware, offers a wide array of configuration options. All that’s left is to add in the Cherry MX switches and some 1N4148 diodes.

But if you want to take things a little further, [Mattia] has that covered as well. The PCB design has provisions for RGB LED back-lighting should you find yourself in need of crunching some numbers in the dark. There’s even a spot for a 0.91″ OLED display if you really want to take things to the next level.

As of right now, the YamPAD is just a bare PCB, but [Mattia] is planning to design a 3D printed enclosure for it soon. The sketches he’s done so far depict a printed case which we think bears more than a passing resemblance to a Wii Fit Balance Board, but of course being a fully open source project, you’ll be free to design your own case based on the PCB’s dimensions. It would be interesting to see what other kind of customization the community might come up with once the design is finalized.

If you like the idea of the YamPAD, you might also want to check out the kbord we covered back in 2017. If you want to see the full keyboard done in this DIY open hardware style, there are already some choice entries into the field.

Custom Calculator Rolls D20 So You Don’t Have To

March 17, 2019 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

There are a number of sticking points that can keep new players away from complex tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Some people are intimidated by the math involved, and of course others just can’t find enough friends who are willing to sit down and play D&D with them in 2019. While this gadget created by [Caleb Everett] won’t help you get more open minded friends, it will take some of the mental gymnastics out of adding up dice rolls.

In its current form the device saves you from the hassle of not only having to roll various combinations of physical dice, but adding up all the faces after the fact as well. In the future [Caleb] plans on adding more advanced software features which will allow for tricks not possible with real dice, such as increasing the likelihood of rolling numbers which haven’t been seen in awhile. Now that the hardware is put together, he’s free to dig into the software side of things and really get creative.

Inside the 3D printed case of his calculator there’s a Adafruit Feather M0 Express, a 128 x 32 OLED display, and a 2200 mAh lithium ion battery that lets him go mobile. The keys, which are Cherry MX clones, are wired directly to the digital pins of the Feather board as [Caleb] found that easier to wrap his head around than doing a matrix. This ended up working out as he had enough pins, but does stifle future expansion a bit.

Even if you aren’t into the sort of tabletop gaming which would benefit from an automatic dice roller and tabulator, we think [Caleb] has come up with a very neat form factor for similar pocket sized gadgets. It reminds us of the Handlink from Quantum Leap; before the prop department swapped it out for a jumble of gummy bears later on in the series, anyway. Since he’s shared the link to the OnShape project, you can even tweak the design a bit without having to suffer through modifying the STLs.

Many of the electronic dice we’ve seen in the past have tried to emulate the size and appearance of traditional dice, so it’s interesting to see this approach which goes in the opposite direction entirely. Critics might say that at some point you’d be better off just using a software application for your smartphone, but we’re not in the business of complaining when people produce interesting pieces of hardware.

C64 Keyboard Helps Keep The Memory Alive

September 20, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

To say that the Commodore 64 was an important milestone in the history of personal computing is probably a bit of an understatement. For a decent chunk of the 1980s, it was the home computer, with some estimates putting the total number of them sold as high as 17 million. For hackers of a certain age, there’s a fairly good chance that the C64 holds a special spot in their childhood; perhaps even setting them on a trajectory they followed for the rest of their lives.

At the risk of showing his age, [Clicky Steve] writes in to tell us about the important role the C64 played in his childhood. He received it as a gift on his fifth birthday from his parents, and fondly remembers the hours he and his grandfather spent with a mail order book learning how to program it. He credits these memories with getting him interested in technology and electronic music. In an effort to keep himself connected to those early memories, he decided to build a modern keyboard with C64 keycaps.

As you might expect, the process started with [Steve] harvesting the caps from a real Commodore, in fact, the very same computer he received as a child. While the purists might shed a tear that the original machine was sacrificed to build this new keyboard, he does note that his C64 had seen better days.

Of course, you can’t just pull the caps off of C64 and stick them on a modern keyboard. [Steve] found the STLs for a 3D printable C64 to Cherry MX adapter on GitHub, and had 80 of them professionally printed as he doesn’t have access to an SLS printer. He reports the design works well, but that non-destructively removing the adapters from the caps once they are pressed into place probably isn’t going to happen; something to keep in mind for others who might be considering sacrificing their personal C64 for the project.

[Steve] installed the caps on a Preonic mechanical keyboard, which worked out fairly well, though he had to get creative with the layout as the C64 caps didn’t really lend themselves to the keyboard’s ortholinear layout. He does mention that switches a bit heavier than the Cherry MX Whites he selected would probably be ideal, but overall he’s extremely happy with his functional tribute to his grandfather.

If you’re more of a purist, you can always adapt the C64 keyboard directly to USB. Or go in the complete opposite direction and put a Raspberry Pi into a C64 carcass.