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Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

stavros.io

51–60 of 230 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#51
Very cool. Reminds me of an excellent radiolab I listened to about Wubi: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/wubi-...

If you can effectively type 70,000 characters with 26 keys, certainly you can type 26 characters with 5 keys. It would be even easier if you made it two handed.

(In other words, I think this could someday be a practical text input method)

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#53
I often have ideas while walking and I always thought this kind of device would be good for jotting down thoughts while taking a walk... I could always use a phone with some dictation note-taking software, but I think a small chorded keyboard device that records everything, has a great battery life, and can sync via bluetooth or wifi would be very nice.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used that? It looks interesting.

I have one I bought maybe 8 years ago. It's the wired version. There was some pretty good tutorial software for learning to type but I could never really get the Ctrl key combos to work which made emacs hard to use. But for just letters and spaces and tabs it worked surprisingly well. You can change the layout also.

I would imagine that the main use case is texting or typing documents, so it's encouraging that it worked well for that.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#57
The esp32 never ceases to amaze me. I bought a set of five of them from Banggood awhile ago, and I was amazed how quickly I was able to build some pretty interesting stuff, like a wireless arcade controller (using the same bluetooth keyboard library that the author mentioned, actually).

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#58

I often have ideas while walking and I always thought this kind of device would be good for jotting down thoughts while taking a walk... I could always use a phone with some dictation note-taking software, but I think a small chorded keyboard device that records everything, has a great battery life, and can sync via bluetooth or wifi would be very nice.

Many years ago on irc someone was trying to hook two of these up to their bicycle's handebars so they could take notes on the go.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#59
post #57

The esp32 never ceases to amaze me. I bought a set of five of them from Banggood awhile ago, and I was amazed how quickly I was able to build some pretty interesting stuff, like a wireless arcade controller (using the same bluetooth keyboard library that the author mentioned, actually).

It's fantastic, I have tens of them because I constantly use them around the house, in things like alarm clocks (https://www.stavros.io/posts/do-not-be-alarmed-clock/), cat toys (no writeup there), scales (maybe later) and other random things.

At $2 each, they're fantastic.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#60

That is very cool! I think the double-presses and three-button presses are pushing it for usability. I wonder if there is a version where you can keep the general form and idea and increase the ease-of-use. I'm thinking add a 5th side-key and a second top-key and use the top ones solely as toggle, not as letters. This way you have 3*5 keys total and fill in the rest with a predictive model, maybe? Or how about a layo…

I would propose four standard keys on side and a thumbstick on the top. Thumbstick is easy to operate and has at least 8 discernible directions, plus 8 half-pushes. That's more combinations than you realistically need so maybe you could relieve the pinky finger and use just 3 buttons.

Uh that's a great idea. Imma try to pop out a version with a joystick over the week-end.
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