61–70 of 92 posts
Author here if there are any questions...
You misspelled "eidophor".
Brad Neuberg (the founder of coworking) worked with Doug about 15 years ago to hook up one of these keysets to a then-current computer to use Augment. Any idea what happened to that work?
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I'm not convinced either of those are the lessons. I think the reason for the keyboard's success is that it has a smooth learning curve. A neophyte can hunt-and-peck with a keyboard. Not so with a chorded keyboard.
but then it kinda stops, couldn’t we layer on chords as well, you can peck “t h e” or just mash “eth” and both would result in “the”, or maybe some sort of english pinyin where only the first few chars are needed?
Or swipe-typing, as another version of that idea. Move in the rough area of the key, and rely on prediction
Author here if there are any questions...
Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken! I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth! The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print…
Cool, the artifacts should be preserved for people studying new haptics device designs.
The MPU6050 is not a great IMU, but the cost might be your best option.
>USB-C connector
One can force the interface into legacy USB 2.0 HID mode, and I would highly recommend that approach if you are excluding a USBC device PMIC. The TP4056 also have some weirdness about entering charge modes, and exiting trickle mode.
Would recommend contacting some museum staff if additional hardware is missing:
Best of luck =3
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Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken! I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth! The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print…
Hi Don. I think this stuff is great, and applaud your work, so don’t think of this as a slight (depending on the answer, of course): how practical is this? Again, if the answer is approximately “not at all practical”, that’s fair, but I guess I could also see it fitting somewhere on a spectrum like emacs vs vi, QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc…
For example, most modern architectures were not the best choice, and have pigeonholed both AMD and Intel for decades. =3
Fascinating read as always Ken. It seems that the concept of a “Chorded Keyboard” from Douglas then spawned several relatively successful successors later on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard Growing up in the Netherlands in the 80s it was hard to not be aware of the “Velotype”: it had more keys and supposedly made it easier to learn the “chords”. Your reference to the book Nerds 2.0.1 is great, the boo…
I urge you to consider using an RC network with a hex inverter to debounce your switch input without resorting to a 100ms delay. I've wasted enough hours to know that the best kind of software debounce is a few resistors and capacitors. https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/d...
I feel like the diode in this schematic is the wrong way around for a normally open switch: it speeds up the keyrelease event when the switch opens instead of the keypress event when it closes. But I think the 100ms delay Ken mentions was intended for a different purpose: to wait for all the fingers in the character to be detected. I think a much better approach would be to wait for one of the keys to be released bef…
That all said, even with 100ms cycles I would hardware debounce the inputs, capture the keystrokes with an ISR to set some semaphore variables, and then create a 100ms loop that checks the current value (and resets) those semaphore variables.
Eliminating switch bounce allows far more elegant software handling of the values you're reading, so Ken could turn his attention and development energy towards things like sliding time windows (100ms starting from the first keydown, for example) instead of trying to boil the ocean cancelling bounces.
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In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. People like Steve Mann would give talks where he demonstrated how he could use his wearable computer (basically a laptop he strapped to himself with a clunky goggle-mounted display) that he controlled with a small chorded keyboard he operated with one hand. Obviously, a decade later with smartphones this looked pretty silly (if it didn't a…
The killer feature of a chorded mechanical (not on-screen) keyboard for me is that one can use it without having to look at it. To literally touch-type (not necessarily text). This is why such keyboards are used where this advantage is material, e.g. in jet fighters.
And surprisingly, this advantage of not having to look at it also applies blind smartphone users, who can use an on-screen Perkins keyboard as an input method. The touch targets are large enough that you can use it without seeing them once you get used to where they are.
https://www.perkins.org/resource/using-braille-input-your-id...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The killer feature of a chorded mechanical (not on-screen) keyboard for me is that one can use it without having to look at it. To literally touch-type (not necessarily text). This is why such keyboards are used where this advantage is material, e.g. in jet fighters.
The most successful chorded keyboard of all time is the Perkins keyboard used to produce braille. If you already know braille, it's much quicker to learn than touch typing on a regular keyboard because they keys correspond directly to dots in the braille character cell. And surprisingly, this advantage of not having to look at it also applies blind smartphone users, who can use an on-screen Perkins keyboard as an inp…
I regularly use my Twiddler with my Android phone. It allows me to fully operate all the applications I use on my desktop computer, e.g. Emacs. https://www.mytwiddler.com/