Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#11

Post by prawn » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 3:29 AM UTC

nikatwork wrote: post #5

Can't find anything on Google, but I saw a docco at least ten years ago of a marine biologist who made one of these for taking notes underwater. It had four waterproof buttons, and by pressing various combos he could type one-handed underwater while holding scientific instruments or a camera. I thought at the time it would be awesome for wearable computers.

It would need to be adapted to work underwater, but Thalmic's MYO could make a great tool for gesture recognition without having to actually carry a keyboard. Just gesture to activate or deactivate, and then have gesture chords for common words or letters of the alphabet? It'd have quite the learning curve though.

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#12

Post by beambot » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 3:50 AM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #6

nikatwork wrote: post #5

Can't find anything on Google, but I saw a docco at least ten years ago of a marine biologist who made one of these for taking notes underwater. It had four waterproof buttons, and by pressing various combos he could type one-handed underwater while holding scientific instruments or a camera. I thought at the time it would be awesome for wearable computers.

Chording keyboards are very common with wearables. The Twiddler being a common example: http://www.handykey.com/

Fun fact: the Twiddler was a mainstay of Thad Starner's wearable. (Thad was the tech lead behind Google Glass.) Thad had pretty impressive WPM on a Twiddler... 80-90 WPM IIRC.

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#13

Post by ics » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:01 AM UTC

gtani wrote: post #9

Orthogonally, i've always wanted a decent pair of foot pedals just to cover Shift, Control, Option and Alt or run key macros. It might be possible to coopt one of the new USB guitar pedals that also control DAW (Logic, ProTools), shd investigate something like: http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-TCE-GSYSTEM-LIST

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches http://www.cb1.com/~john/computing/emacs/handsfree/pedals.ht... http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/

...do a search for "emacs foot pedals" and you'll find many results. Years ago when I got my first Mac I had visions of buying all these cool MIDI devices and trying to control it with those. As an 11-year-old without internet access I hit a dead end pretty quick, but there are certainly others with the idea.[1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5928061/using-a-piano-key...

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#14

Post by dminor » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:52 AM UTC

My friend Zack made one called asetniop: http://asetniop.com/

Now he's working on something similar for Leap Motion and Google Glass: http://dextype.com/

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#15

Post by jff » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 6:24 AM UTC

I built a 7-key chording keyset based on the Spiffchorder. It should be adaptable to almost any configuration. Mine came out a bit blocky and hard to use due to crappy buttons.

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#16

Post by kybernetikos » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 7:05 AM UTC

I was pretty excited about http://chordite.com/ for a while, but at the moment it's still a build-your-own proposition and I struggle to find the time.

I'd really like a non-dominant-hand, bluetooth, chordal keyboard that can replace the mouse and enables decent typing speed suitable for development (i.e. reasonably easy to type { } [ ] , . @ : / \ *, and supports shortcuts).

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#17

Post by flarg » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 8:18 AM UTC

I had a Microwriter Agenda for a few years (until it got stuck in a system loop and sounded a reminder alarm every hour until the battery pack ran out) - had a great chording keyboard.

Recently purchased a CyKey [1] (a follow-on by the designer of the Microwriter Keyboard) and it works well (but I think my hands are too small for it).

In both cases I've fond that eventually my hand learns the key strokes and I never forget them, but symbols, brackets etc. are hard to do.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyKey

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#18

Post by berntb » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 9:25 AM UTC

ics wrote: post #3

berntb wrote: post #2

I've always wondered about the usability of a chording keyboard with a smart phone's edge (or an xPad) and four areas under the fingers. (Four buttons is quite few combinations. You probably need the thumb too, with two-three alternative buttons for it.) It would be easy to have a learning mode which give feedback about possible combinations, since it is on a screen. My only (hobby) programming for mobile has been on…

You might be interested in this[1] which was posted to HN some time ago. iOS is a no-go for this sort of thing for now at least, but I'm unfamiliar with Android. For hardware modules I think the thumbs work very well as a modal control, but on a small touch screen I don't know how it would work. [1] http://asetniop.com/

Thanks! I missed that.

(They should have "Desktop version" and "iPad version" bigger on the page you linked. I browsed a bit before finding those. Can you buy hardware somewhere?)

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#19

Post by extra88 » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 2:58 PM UTC

gtani wrote: post #9

Orthogonally, i've always wanted a decent pair of foot pedals just to cover Shift, Control, Option and Alt or run key macros. It might be possible to coopt one of the new USB guitar pedals that also control DAW (Logic, ProTools), shd investigate something like: http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-TCE-GSYSTEM-LIST

Foot switches are available from ergonomic hardware companies. Kinesis makes the Savant Elite line of USB foot switches. They only provide Windows software for programming them but once programmed they can work with other OS's (with some limitations).

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/fs-savant-elite.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/fs-elite-single-compatibility.ht...

Re: Building a Chording Keyboard: Progress So Far

#20

Post by mathiasx » Tue, Aug 06, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

cjh_ wrote: post #8

Awesome project thanks for sharing. A few months ago I started on a project to make a 'grip' style chording keyboard [0] also based on the teensy, sadly the project has stalled for a bit (graduated and got a full-time). I have the keys wired [1] but haven't figure out a nice way to mount them yet, and the firmware isn't finished. [0] http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=43132 [1] http://i.imgur.com/zQiYmQC.jpg EDIT: I…

I received a reply on Twitter from Bill Buxton, who worked at Xerox/PARC and other cool places, pointing me at this chapter out of his book:

http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

The section "The NLS System: Engelbart and English" contains the most detailed explanation of Engelbart's chording keyboard that I've found, and the rest of the chapter is an interesting read.