[Taylor] wanted to join the cool kids club and build a macropad for CAD work and video editing, but didn’t want to do it the traditional way with an Arduino. We can get behind that. In fact, [Taylor] wanted to reuse some old piece of tech if possible, which is even better. With a little luck, they found a used gaming mouse with a set of 12 tiny macro buttons on the side that were ripe for reuse. Only the scroll wheel was reported to be broken.
After verifying that all the macro buttons worked, [Taylor] tore down the mouse and extracted the daughterboard, then removed the sticker that held the rubber dome actuators in place. Then they wired up twelve Kailh box jades to the pads, doing some nice diagonal work with bare 30 AWG wire to join all the common pins together.
[Taylor] designed and printed a simple enclosure that’s a slim 21.5 mm tall including the switch plate, and then made a dozen keycaps to match. That was until [Taylor] remembered some relegendable keycaps they had lying around — the kind that let you print your own labels and trap them underneath clear plastic. The only problem was that they are stemmed for some cylindrical actuator, so [Taylor] designed an adapter piece so they would fit on MX-style sliders. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
We all know by now that macropads are super cool shortcut machines. And what’s cooler than a popsicle? Well, this cute little thing, which goes by the name of Macropopsicle.
The freezer’s open if you want your own Macropopsicle. There’s not much more to this tasty and practical desktop treat than an adafruit QT Py, a couple of Cherry MX-style switches, some wires, and a handful of printed parts. One cool thing about this design is that all the pieces print with little to no supports, and many of them snap together.
We say there’s a lot to like about Macropopsicle — it’s cute, it’s useful, and there’s even a little bite taken out of it that you can see in some of the renders. [oxisidia] even shoved a real popsicle stick in there to complete the look.
Keyboard aficionados will no doubt recognize Macropopsicle as a great companion to Milk, a 2% keyboard.
It seems that the engineers of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft have some ‘splaining to do. The $981M asteroid-seeking mission launched without a hitch, but when the two solar panels unfolded, one of them failed to latch into place. Lucy’s two large solar arrays combine to an impressive 51 square meters. Both are critical to this 12-year mission as it will travel farther from the Sun than any previous spacecraft, and be gone for longer. The problem is that Lucy is on an escape route, and so they can’t just sidle up to her with a repair craft. Even so, NASA and Lockheed are “pretty optimistic” that they can fix the problem somehow. On the bright side, both solar arrays are providing power and charging batteries inside the cockpit.
It’s kind of hard to believe, but KDE is turning 25 this year! Well, the actual anniversary date (October 14th) has already passed, but the festivities continue through the 25th when KDE founder Matthias Ettrich delivers a fireside chat at 17:00 UTC. Registration begins here.
EnergyStar, purveyors of appliance efficiency ratings and big yellow stickers, will no longer recommend gas-powered water heaters, furnaces, and clothes dryers on their yearly Most Efficient list. They will continue to give them ratings, however. This move was prompted by several environmentalist groups who pointed out that continuing to recommend gas appliances would not put America on track to reach Biden’s 2050 net-zero carbon emissions goal, since they produce greenhouse gases. We totally understand the shift away from gas, but not so much the nitty gritty of this move, which the article presents as exclusive of any appliance that doesn’t run on 100% clean energy. You can’t prove that a user’s electricity is renewable. For example, this consumer is well aware that the energy company in her town still burns coal for the most part. Anyway, here’s the memo. And a PDF warning.
Sure, you can trawl eBay for space rocks, but how do you know for sure that you’re getting a real meteorite? You could play the 1 in 100 billion or so odds that one will just fall in your lap. Just a few weeks ago, a meteorite crashed through a British Columbia woman’s ceiling and landed between two decorative pillows on her bed, narrowly missing her sleeping head. Ruth Hamilton awoke to the sound of an explosion, unaware of what happened until she saw the drywall dust on her face and looked back at the bed. The 2.8 pound rock was the size of a large man’s fist and was one of two meteorites to hit Golden, BC that evening. The other one landed safely in a field.
Hackaday alum Jeremy Cook wrote in to give us a heads up that his newest build, the JC Pro Macro 2, is currently available through Kickstarter. It’s exactly what it sounds like — a Pro Micro-powered macro pad. But this version is packed with extra keyswitches, blinkenlights, and most importantly for the Hackaday universe, broken out GPIO pins. Do what you will with the eight switches, rotary encoder, and optional OLED screen, and do it with Arduino or QMK. Jeremy is offering a variety of reward levels, from bare boards with SMT LEDs soldered on to complete kits, or fully assembled and ready to go.
You may have noticed that I neglected to write an introductory paragraph for the last one of these — I was just too excited to get into the keyboards and keyboard accessories, I guess. I can’t promise that I’ll always have something to say up here, but this week I definitely do: thank you for all the tips I’ve received so far! The readers are what make Hackaday great, and this little keyboard roundup column is no exception. Fabulous fodder, folks!
Kamina Chameleon
This is [deʃhipu]’s daily driver. Vroom!Like any keyboard enthusiast worth their soldering iron, [deʃhipu] keeps trying for the ultimate keyboard — ideally, one that runs CircuitPython and makes a great daily driver for high-speed typing.
The latest version is the Kamina, a one-piece split with a SAMD21 brain that is slim and narrow without being cramped. [deʃhipu] started by splitting the Planck layout, spreading it, adding a number row, and eventually, an extra column of Kailh Chocs on the right hand. One-piece splits are great as long as the split suits your shoulders, because everything stays in place. When you do move it around, both halves move as one and you don’t have to mess with the positioning nearly as much as with a two-piece. And of course, since he designed it himself, it fits.
The really cool thing here is the center module concept. It’s functional, it looks nice, and as long as it doesn’t get in the way of typing, seems ideal. So far, [deʃhipu] has made a couple different versions with joysticks, encoders, and buttons, and is currently working on one with a Home button made for cell phones to take advantage of their built-in optical trackpads.
Esrille NISSE Looks Nice
This is the Esrille NISSE keyboard and it comes in two sizes! Okay, the two sizes don’t look that different, but the key spacing specs say otherwise. To me, this looks like an Alice with a better and ortholinear layout. These bat-wing beauties are new to me, but they’ve been around for a few years now and are probably difficult to stumble upon outside of Japan. Although Esrille doesn’t seem to make any other keyboards, they do make a portable PC built on the Raspberry Pi compute module.
I love me a one-piece split when its done properly, and this one seems to be pretty darn close to perfect. How do I know? You can print out a paper-craft version to try out either of the two sizes. I didn’t take it quite that far, but you can bet that I opened the smaller size’s image in a new tab and put my hands all over the screen to test the layout.
I especially like the thumb clusters and the inside keys on this thing, but I think the innermost thumb keys would be too painful to use, and I would probably just use my index finger. I would totally buy one of these, but they’re a little too expensive, especially since the smaller one costs more. (What’s up with that?) The great news is that the firmware is open-source. Between that and the paper-craft models, a person could probably build their own. Check out [xahlee]’s site for a review and a lot more pictures of the NISSE and similar keebs.
To say that 2020 was a transformative year would be something of an understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic completely changed the way we worked, learned, and lived. Despite all those jokes about how much time people spend on their devices rather than interacting face-to-face with other humans, it turns out that when you can’t get more than a few people together in the same room, it throws our entire society into disarray.
Our community had to rethink how we congregated, and major events like HOPE, DEF CON, and even our own Hackaday Supercon, had to be quickly converted into virtual events that tried with varying degrees of success to capture the experience of hundreds or thousands of hackers meeting up in real life. While few would argue that a virtual hacker convention can ever truly replace a physical one, we learned there are undeniable benefits to embracing the advantages offered by cyberspace. If nothing else, the virtual hacker meetups of 2020 saw a far larger and more diverse array of attendees and presenters than ever before.
As we begin seeing the first rays of light at the end of the long, dark, tunnel we’ve been stuck in, it’s clear that some of the changes that COVID-19 forced on our community are here to stay. As eager as we all are to get back to the epic hackfests of old, nobody wants to close the door on all those who would be unable to attend physically now that they’ve gotten to peek behind the curtain.
With this in mind, this year’s DEF CON is being presented in both physical and virtual forms simultaneously. If you made to Las Vegas, great. If not, you can follow along through chat rooms and video streams from the comfort of your own home. Following the theme, the DC29 badge is not only a practical tool for virtual attendees, but an electronic puzzle for those who are able to bring a few of them together physically. Let’s take a closer look at this socially distanced badge and the tech that went into it.
As much as I’d like to devote an article to each and every bit of keyboard-related what-have-you that I come across in my travels through the intertubes, there just aren’t enough hours. And after all, this isn’t Clack-a-Day. To that end, I gained editorial approval to bring you a periodic round-up of news and other tidbits on the keyboard and keyboard accessories front, and here we are. So let’s get to it!
Inside this open-source banana is that perennial favorite for macro pads, the Arduino Pro Micro, and eight switches that are wired up directly to input pins. We’re not sure what flavor of Cherry those switches are, hopefully brown or green, but we suddenly wish Cherry made yellow switches. If you want to build your own, the STLs and code are available, and we know for a fact that other switch purveyors do in fact make yellow-stemmed switches.
Contrary to what the BOM says, we believe the sticker is mandatory because it just makes the build — we imagine there would be fewer double takes without it. Hopefully this fosters future fun keyboard builds from the community, and we can’t wait to sink our teeth into the split version!
After verifying that all the macro buttons worked, [Taylor] tore down the mouse and extracted the daughterboard, then removed the sticker that held the rubber dome actuators in place. Then they wired up twelve Kailh box jades to the pads, doing some nice diagonal work with bare 30 AWG wire to join all the common pins together.
![[deshipu]'s DIY keyboard with various center modules](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/deʃhipu-Kamina.png)
