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3 Articles

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Gaming Typewriter

June 17, 2025 by 3 Comments

Can you teach an old typewriter new tricks? You can, at least if you’re [maniek-86]. And a word to all you typewriter fanatics out there — this Optima SP 26 was beyond repair, lacking several internal parts.

A sleek typewriter with a monitor and a mouse.
Image by [maniek-86] via reddit
But the fully available keyboard was a great start for a gaming typewriter. So [maniek-86] crammed in some parts that were just laying around unused, starting with a micro-ATX motherboard.

But let’s talk about the keyboard. It has a standard matrix, which [maniek-86] hooked up to an Arduino Lenoardo. Although the keyboard has a Polish layout, [maniek-86] remapped it to English-US layout.

As you’ll see in the photos of the internals, this whole operation required careful Tetris-ing of the components to avoid overheating and ensure the cover could go back on.

The graphics were a bit of a challenge, since the motherboard had no PCI-E x16 slot. To address this, [maniek-86] used a riser cable, probably connected to a PCI-E x1 slot with an adapter, in order to use an NVIDIA GT 635 GPU. It can’t run AAA games at 4k, but you can bet that it’ll play Minecraft, Fortnite, or Dota 2 just fine.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Copycat Keyboard

December 30, 2024 by 1 Comment

This is Crater75, an almost completely from-scratch row-staggered wireless split board that [United_Parfait_6383] has been working on for a few months. Everything but the keycaps and switches is DIY.

The Crater75 split keyboard, which features OLEDs on the Function row.
Image by [United_Parfait_6383] via reddit
As cool as a keyboard full of screens might seem, can you imagine what it would be like to type at speed on a sea of slick surfaces? Not very nice, I’m thinking. But having them solely on the Function row seems like the perfect compromise. Here, the Function row keys interact with foreground applications, and change with whatever has focus. For the curious, those are 0.42″ OLEDs from Ali with a resolution of 72×40.

I’m not sure what’s going on internally, but the two sides connect with magnets, and either side’s USB-C can be used to charge the board. Both sides have a 2100 mAh Li-Po battery, and the average current of the OLED displays is low enough that the board can run for months on a single charge.

The switches are Gateron low-profiles and are wearing keycaps recycled from a Keychron, which add to the professional finish. Speaking of, the enclosures were manufactured by JLC3DP using the Nylon Multi-Jet Fusion process, but [United_Parfait_6383] says the left side feels too light, so the next revision will likely be CNC’d aluminium. Be sure to check out this short video of Crater75 in action.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Breadboard Macropad

February 8, 2023 by 6 Comments

For their first custom, hand-wired keyboard, [terryorchard] aka [70rch] didn’t want to mess with making a total split, and we don’t really blame them. However, as you can see, they ended up with a monoblock split, which aside from being our own personal preference, looks fantastic, and also happened to be what fit on the print bed.

What you’re looking at is a 40% remix of the Alice layout with a columnar stagger. It’s also a bit 6×3 Corne-inspired on the ergonomic front. Brain-wise, it’s got an exposed Elite Pi driving a matrix of Kailh Choc pinks and an EC11 encoder. The encoder scrolls by default, and then becomes a volume knob on the numbers and symbols layer. One super cool thing about this keyboard is the secret third layer, which is unlocked by pressing the rotary encoder. This leads to some home row mods and disables the outside columns, culminating in a test 3×5 with two layers.

Via KBD #112

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Breadboard Macropad” →