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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The NEO With The Typewriter Shell

February 16, 2026 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Isn’t this glorious? If you don’t recognize what this is right away (or from the post title), it’s an AlphaSmart NEO word processor, repackaged in a 3D-printed typewriter-esque shell, meticulously designed by the renowned [Un Kyu Lee] of Micro Journal fame.

An AlphaSmart NEO in a 3D-printed, typewriter-esque enclosure, complete with big knobs. — Image by [Un Kyu Lee] via GitHub

If you don’t want to spend roughly 40 hours printing ~1 kg of filament in order to make your own, you can join the wait-list on Tindie like I did. Go here to figure out which color you want, and email [Un Kyu Lee] when you order. In the meantime, you can watch the assembly video and then check out this playlist that shows the available colors.

Assembly looks easy enough; there’s no soldering, but you do have to disconnect and reconnect the fiddly ribbon cables. After that, it’s just screws.

This design happened by accident. A friend named [Hook] who happens to manage the AlphaSmart Flickr community had given [Un Kyu Lee] a NEO2 to try out, but before he could, it fell from a shelf and the enclosure suffered a nasty hole near the screen. But the internals seemed fine, so he got the idea to design a new enclosure.

I don’t believe the knobs do anything, but they sure do look nice. There’s an area along the top where you can clip a light, since the NEO has no backlight. There are also two smaller slots on the sides if your light won’t clip to the top.

I’d really like to do this to one of my NEOs. I have two NEO regulars, but reviewers on Tindie report that it works just as well with those as the NEO2.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Typewriter Orchestra

January 31, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Have you ever wished you had more control over what goes into a kit keyboard build? Like, a whole lot more control? Well, that’s the idea behind the Akruvia 12×4 Playground by [iketsj].

This is a 48-key ortholinear keyboard, but other than that, it’s a complete blank slate. The kit includes the PCB, diodes, RGB LEDs, and Kailh Choc V1 hot swap sockets, which is really the only choice you don’t have in the matter.

All the rest is up to you, thanks to a generous prototyping area that wraps around three sides of the keys. Bring your own microcontroller and anything else that sounds useful, like displays, rotary encoders, gesture sensors, pointing devices, you name it.

You could even magnetically link a macro pad to one side, as [iketsj] teases in the intro video. [iketsj] has made the kit available through links on their website, and you’ll find a product guide there as well.

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