keyboard

455 Articles

3D Prints Turn Any Keyboard Isomorphic

June 1, 2019 by 4 Comments

In the history of weird musical instrument interfaces, isomorphic keyboards are a favorite. These keyboards look like a grid of buttons, but when you play them, the relative shapes of chords are always the same. The benefit? Just say no to five hundred years of clavier tradition. It looks cool, too. Theoretically, it’s easier to play independent of whatever key you’re in. [John Moriarty] has built one of these isomorphic keyboards, and unlike everything we’ve ever seen, there are no electronics. It’s all 3D printable and turns any MIDI keyboard into an isomorphic keyboard.

We have seen isomorphic (piano) keyboards before, from a slew of Cherry keyboard switches to a bunch of arcade buttons. There is one downside to these builds, and that is that it’s really just building a MIDI controller. [John]’s build is simply a 3D printable overlay for a traditional piano that turns any standard keyboard into an isomorphic keyboard. The advantage being that this is really just a few pounds of plastic to be printed out and not a mess of wiring and electronics. Simple, removable, reversible. Not bad.

This keyboard effectively adds two differently colored keytops to each key on a keyboard. The best explination of how this keyboard works is in this video, but the basic idea is that all the note names are grouped together by color; C flat, C natural, and C sharp are all blue, for example. This means a third interval is two colors away, and a minor third is two colors to the right and one ‘row’ down. Yeah, it’s weird but that’s what an isomorphic keyboard is.

Since this is just a bunch of 3D printed parts meant to fit on any piano keybed, this is something that’s extremely easy to replicate. All the files for this keyboard overlay are available on Thingiverse, and [John] is offering to print these key tops for others without a 3D printer.

Braille Keyboard Finds Its Voice

May 17, 2019 by 9 Comments

If you have a serious visual impairment, using a computer isn’t easy. [Dhiraj] has a project that allows people fluent in Braille to use that language for input. In addition to having a set position for fingers, the device also reads the key pressed as you type. With some third party software it is possible to even create Word documents, according to [Dhiraj].

You can see the finished product in the video below. This is one of those projects where the idea is the hardest part. Reading six buttons and converting them into characters is fairly simple. Each Braille character uses a cell of six bumps and the buttons mimic those bumps (although laid out for your fingers).

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Building Keyboards With Resin Printers

May 7, 2019 by 12 Comments

Aside from putting a whole lot of tact switches on a board, no one has quite figured out how to make very small keyboards for wearable projects. [Madaeon] might have the answer, and it’s using a resin-based 3D printer to create a flexible keyboard without silicone.

The world of small keyboards is filled with what are effectively the squishy parts of a remote control. This uses a piece of silicone and tiny carbon ‘dots’ on the underside of each button. Press the button, and these carbon dots bridge two traces on a PCB, closing a switch. No one has yet mastered home-casting silicone, although the people behind the ESP32 WiPhone have been experimenting with aluminum molds.

Instead of going down the path of casting and curing silicone, [Madaeon] decided to use 3D printing, specifically resin 3D printing, using a very flexible resin. The build process is what you would expect — just some button-shaped objects, but this gets clever when it comes to bridging the connections on the keyboard matrix. This is done with conductive paint, carefully applied to the underside of each button.

Right now this is a viable means of getting a tiny keyboard easily. The color is a garish pink, and the labels on each button aren’t quite as visible as anyone would like, but the latter can be fixed with silkscreening, just like how it’s done on the silicone buttons for remote controls.

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Need A Small Keyboard? Build Your Own!

April 23, 2019 by 72 Comments

If you want keyboards, we can get you keyboards. If you want a small keyboard, you might be out of luck. Unless you’re hacking Blackberry keyboards or futzing around with tiny tact switches, there’s no good solution to small, thin, customization keyboards. There’s one option though: silicone keyboards. No one’s done it yet, so I figured I might as well.

Unfortunately, there is no readily available information on the design, construction, or manufacture of custom silicone keypads. There is a little documentation out there, but every factory that does this seems to have copy and pasted the information from each other. Asking a company in China about how to do it is a game of Chinese Whispers. Despite this, I managed to build a custom silicone keypad, and now I’m sharing this information on how to do it with you.

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A Keyboard For Your Thumb

March 26, 2019 by 11 Comments

Here’s an interesting problem that no one has cracked. There are no small keyboards that are completely configurable. Yes, you have some Blackberry keyboards connected to an Arduino, but you’re stuck with the key layout. You could get one of those Xbox controller chat pads, but again, you’re stuck with the keyboard layout they gave you. No, the right solution to building small and cheap keyboards is to make your own, and [David Boucher] has the best one yet.

The Thumb Keyboard uses standard through-hole 4mm tact switches on a 10×4 grid, wired up in a row/column matrix. Yes, this is a mechanical keyboard, which is important: no one wants those terrible rubber dome keyswitches, and you need only look at the RGB gaming keyboard market for evidence of that. These tact switches fit into a standard perfboard, allowing anyone to build this at home with a soldering iron. After wiring up the keyboard and connecting it to an Arduino, [David] had a working keyboard.

There’s a lot going on with this build, not the least of which is the custom, 3D printed bezel for those tiny, tiny tact switches. This is a much simpler solution than building an entirely new PCB, which we’ve seen before. Since this is a 3D printed bezel, it’s easy to put labels or whatnot above the keys, or potentially print buttons. It’s great work, and one of the best small keyboards we could imagine.

Here’s The First Person To Put A Pi In The Raspberry Pi Keyboard

March 24, 2019 by 49 Comments

Last week, the Raspberry Pi foundation released the first official Raspberry Pi-branded keyboard and mouse. As a keyboard, it’s probably pretty great; it’s clad in a raspberry and white color scheme, the meta key is the Pi logo, there are function keys. Sure, the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys are in their usual, modern, incorrect positions (each day we stray further from God’s light) but there’s also a built-in USB hub. Everything balances out, I guess.

The Pi keyboard started shipping this week, and it took two days for someone to put a Pi zero inside. Here’s how you do it, and here’s how you turn a Pi keyboard into a home computer, like a speccy or C64.

The parts required for this build include the official Pi keyboard, a Pi Zero W, an Adafruit Powerboost, which is basically the circuitry inside a USB power bank, and a LiPo battery. The project starts by disassembling the keyboard with a spudger, screwdriver, or other small wedge-type tool, disconnecting the keyboard’s ribbon cables, and carefully shaving down the injection molded webbing that adds strength to the keyboard’s enclosure. The project is wrapped up by drilling holes for a power LED, a button to turn the Pi on and off, and the holes for the USB and HDMI ports.

One shortcoming of this build is the use of a male-to-male USB cable to connect the keyboard half of the circuitry to the Pi. This can be worked around by simply soldering a few pieces of magnet wire from the USB port on the Pi to the USB input on the USB hub. But hey, doing it this way gives the Official Pi keyboard a convenient carrying handle, and when one of the ports breaks you’ll be able to do it the right way the second time. Great work.

Venabili Is The Delightful Keyboard You Can’t Buy

March 19, 2019 by 31 Comments

If you code or write a lot, you live or die with your keyboard. The Venabili web site calls Venabili “the delightful keyboard” which begs the question: what makes a keyboard delightful. The site continues:

“Venabili is a 40% mechanical, programmable, ergonomic and hackable computer keyboard.

Being a fully programmable keyboard, it gives you the ability to create layers of functionality, declare multifunction keys that can operate as both modifiers and normal keys, control the mouse, define macros, and more.”

Sounds at least 40% delightful, right? Where do you buy one? You don’t. The keyboard is a set of plans and like a Jedi lightsaber, you have to build your own. Continue reading “Venabili Is The Delightful Keyboard You Can’t Buy” →