An e-ink screen mounted on a small white box is flanked by four mechanical keyboard switches. A power cable is routed from the device to a power bank that is mostly out of frame.

DIY E-Reader Has Hot Swap Mechanical Keys

October 9, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

In the early days of e-readers, most devices had physical buttons to turn pages and otherwise navigate the device. [bwkrayb] longed for these halcyon days before touchscreen e-readers and improved on the concept by adding mechanical keyswitches.

By using an Adafruit NeoKey 1×4 as the keyboard interface, the e-reader has four hot-swappable keyboard sockets with built-in LEDs. [bwkrayb] is hoping to use these LEDs to implement a front lighting system in a future revision of the hardware.

The 3.7″ screen displays pages after running an EPUB through ebooklib and Beautiful Soup to generate files that can be used by the Waveshare drivers. Refresh time is reportedly slow, although [bwkrayb] suspects this might be due more to the limited power of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 more than the display itself.

If you want to see some other open e-reader projects we’ve covered, check out the EPub-Inkplate or the Open Book Project.

Maiden Kansas City Keyboard Meetup Was A Clacking Good Time

August 30, 2022 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

Wow! I can’t believe it already came and went — but the first annual (semi-annual?) Kansas City Keyboard Meetup was, in my opinion, a rousing success. And I think organizer and Discord-nominated god among men [Ricardo] agrees with me. (He does; I checked before we left the venue.)

First of all, the attendance was off the charts, perhaps thanks in part to our announcement last week. We aim to get you the news sooner next time, in case you want to come in from surrounding states and municipalities. RSVPs sat around 20-something, and then shot up to 60 or so in the days leading up. Fortunately, there were enough tiny sandwiches, granola bars, and s t i c k e r s to go around. I already put mine on my keebin’ toolbox.

The Hive Was Buzzing

The event took place at Hive Co-Working thanks to [Nick], and overall, the space turned out to be a good layout. We were set up right inside the windows looking out to the street, and I like to think that we drew in a few passers-by, though I am probably more than a little bit biased. I wondered aloud on the way home how a sandwich board out on the sidewalk would have affected the influx of randos.

My husband pointed out that even though we were all the way downtown, this is Kansas City and not New York City, and most of the keyboard enthusiasts about town were already accounted for. Hmpf. I still say we should try a sandwich board next time. We could go meta and mention the tiny sandwiches inside. Don’t worry — there was plenty of sanitizer and napkins to go around, plus a box of gloves.

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The Rollercoaster Of Developing The Ultimate Hackable Keyboard

August 2, 2022 by Danie Conradie 14 Comments

When designing anything with “hackable” in the punchline, scope creep is an integral part of the process. You end up trying to create something to potentially be an infinite number of things for an infinite number of users. [Zack Freedman] is going really deep down the rabbit hole with his MiRage keyboard and has been documenting the progress in his usual entertaining style, with some cautionary notes included.

The most fascinating tale from this come about as a result of adding RGB LEDs beneath the keys, while still allowing everything to function when the keyboard is split in two. Thanks to an IO expander chip in one side of the board, a standard TRRS audio cable is enough to link both sides together. But the addition of addressable LEDs meant more lines were required.

[Zack] thought he had found a solution in the form of SATA cables, but it turns out all SATA cables internally connect pins 1,3, and 7, making them useless for this application. He realized he had no choice but to add a second microcontroller to the “dumb” side of the keyboard and return to I2C over a TRRS cable. However, the RP2040-based Seeed XIAO’s I2C absolutely refused to play along. After a fortnight of frustrating debugging, it turns out there was a bug in the pin definitions. Fortunately, this also revealed that the XIAO had an undocumented secondary I2C interface, which he plans to configure as a peripheral to make the keyboard almost infinitely expandable with additional keys.

An earlier version of the MiRage featured tactile OLED displays, but it turns out the thin panes of glass don’t handle repeated flexing well, so they had to be scrapped. In their place came a touchscreen E-paper display, but now this seems to be evolving into a pluggable module for any input device that your heart desires, including possibly a haptic SmartKnob. Another major update are PCB footprints that support both CHOC and MX switches.

It all started with the MiRage V1 keyboard intended to for use in an updated version of [Zack]’s cyberdeck. After realizing how many people were interested in the keyboard but not the cyberdeck, he shifted focus to refining the MiRage.

This project still has some way to go, so we’ll certainly be keeping our eye on it. In the meantime, we’ve recently covered another exceptionally customizable keyboard that might catch your fancy.

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A mechanical keyboard with a haptic knob and E-ink display

Smart Modular Keyboard Sports An E-ink Display And A Haptic Feedback Knob

July 28, 2022 by Robin Kearey 19 Comments

While most people may think that a keyboard is just a board with keys, those who read Hackaday will no doubt know that there’s an infinite variety of beautiful designs to suit any use case. [Peng Zhihui] is the latest to impress us with an excellent custom keyboard that packs several unusual features (video in Chinese, with English subtitles, embedded below). What started out as a simple lockdown project turned into what [Zhihui] imagines to be the ultimate keyboard for his daily tasks. At first glance it might look like just another custom keyboard with mechanical switches, but when you look inside you’ll find it full of clever design tricks and neat features.

When he started on the design of the main key area, [Zhihui] could have used any of the open-source keyboard frameworks. Instead, he decided to do everything himself in order to obtain maximum performance and configurability. This went all the way down to the readout circuitry: rather than wiring the switches in a matrix, as most keyboards do, he used a set of shift registers. This enables the main ARM controller to read out every key separately, eliminating ghosting and allowing any number of keys to be pressed simultaneously. The shift registers are driven by a 4 MHz SPI clock, which means that a full scan of all keys takes just 40 microseconds.

That is brilliant, but what makes this project really interesting is an extension module on the left side of the keyboard that turns it into what [Zhihui] calls a “smart keyboard”. The bottom part of this module has an E-ink display that can show a variety of useful information: current memory usage, email notifications or simply the weather forecast.

Next to the big E-ink screen is a tiny OLED display that works in tandem with a haptic feedback knob. Based on a brushless DC motor, this knob can be configured in various ways to perform several different tasks. It can be set to friction-less spinning mode, which is useful for quickly scrolling through long documents. It can become a multi-level switch to enable or disable features, or a volume knob with virtual end stops. There’s even an option to use it as a physical indicator for things like the current CPU usage.

The keyboard also houses a USB hub to attach other gadgets, as well as a lithium battery to power the haptic knob, since it uses more power than a standard USB 2.0 port can deliver. There’s even a little capacitive touch strip below the space bar, which allows you to use one of your thumbs to switch between different tabs or to use quick copy/paste functions.

If all of this sounds like your idea of a perfect keyboard, then you’ll be pleased to hear that [Zhihui] plans to open-source all hardware and software designs once he’s cleaned up his code. Until that time, you may want to read up on the working principle of a haptic smart knob, or find out what’s the most efficient way to read out a certain number of buttons with a microcontroller.

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Mechanical Keyboards Are Over, This Device Has Won

June 24, 2022 by Jenny List 37 Comments

The desk of any self-respecting technology enthusiast in the 2020s is not complete without a special keyboard of some sort, be it a vintage IBM Model M, an esoteric layout or form factor, or just a standard keyboard made with clacky mechanical switches. But perhaps we’ve found the one esoteric keyboard to rule them all, in the form of [HIGEDARUMA]’s 8-bit keyboard. You can all go home now, the competition has been well and truly won by this input device with the simplest of premises; enter text by setting the ASCII value as binary on a row of toggle switches. No keyboard is more retro than the one you’d find on the earliest microcomputers!

Jokes aside, perhaps this keyboard may be just a little bit esoteric for many readers, but it’s nevertheless a well-executed project. Aside from the row of binary inputs there is a keypress button which sends whatever the value is to the computer, and a stock button that allows for multiple inputs to be stored and sent as one. If you pause for a moment and think how often you use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for example, this is an essential function. There’s more information on a Japanese website (Google Translate link), which reveals that under the hood it’s a Bluetooth device running on an ESP32.

We can imagine that with a bit of use it would be possible to memorize ASCII as binary pretty quickly, in fact we wouldn’t be at all surprised to find readers already possessing that skill. But somehow we can’t imagine it ever being a particularly fast text input device. Take a look for yourselves, it’s in the video below the break.

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Ditch The Laptop For The Tabletop

May 23, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 42 Comments

The idea of a cyberdeck is simple. A relatively portable case that is primarily a keyboard with some screen attached. Cyberdecks often try to hit a particular aesthetic or vibe rather than focusing on usability or practicality. [Carter Hurd] took a step back and asked himself what would be a cyberdeck-like system that he could practically use every day.

[Carter’s] build is a prototype that allows him to try out the form factor and use it as a daily driver, so many decisions were made to speed up the build and get something functional. For example, rather than spend the time tweaking and printing his own keyboard, he used an off-the-shelf keyboard he knew he liked. While a framework motherboard would have been perfect for something like this, they, unfortunately, weren’t available when [Carter] started the build. So [Carter] used a used gaming laptop for the task. He had hoped to drive the display directly from the motherboard as many laptops use embedded DisplayPort internally. Unfortunately, this didn’t work as the motherboard didn’t support the resolution he was trying to drive at, so he just used the external port to drive the screen. A 3d printed base fits underneath the keyboard to hold the laptop motherboard with little extensions for bits that don’t work well, such as the wifi card. The chassis also has a slot that allows a secondary display to slot right in.

Ultimately, it is something of a modern-day typewriter and something like a cyberdeck. Either way, we love it. Video after the break.

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Framework Board Gets This Round Display PC Rolling

May 10, 2022 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

The Framework laptop is already a very exciting prospect for folks like us — a high-end computer that we can actually customize, upgrade, and repair with the manufacturer’s blessing? Sounds like music to our ears. But we’re also very excited about seeing how the community can press the modular components of the Framework into service outside of the laptop itself.

A case in point, this absolutely gorgeous retro-inspired computer built by [Penk Chen]. The Mainboard Terminal combines a Framework motherboard, five inch 1080 x 1080 round LCD display, and OLKB Preonic mechanical keyboard into a slick 3D printed enclosure that’s held together with magnets for easy access. Compared to the Raspberry Pi that we usually find tucked into custom computer builds like this, the Framework board offers incredible performance, not to mention the ability to run x86 operating systems and software.

[Penk] has Ubuntu 22.04 LTS loaded up right now, and he reports that everything works as expected, though there are a few xrandr commands you’ll need to run in order for the system to work properly with the circular display. The standard Ubuntu UI doesn’t look particularly well suited to such an unusual viewport, but we imagine that’s an issue you’ll have to learn to live with when experimenting with such an oddball screen.

It was just a few weeks ago that we brought you word that Framework was releasing the mechanical drawings for their Mainboard module, and we predicted then that it would be a huge boon to those building bespoke computers. Truth be told we expected a cyberdeck build of some sort to be the first one to hit our inbox, but you certainly won’t catch us complaining about seeing more faux-vintage personal terminals.