Test it on kids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
Rotary Keyboard
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#22Part of me had hoped that this was some sort of insane mechanical keyboard, where every single key was on the rotary.
It doesn’t make sense for the modifier keys to be on the rotary dial, but the rest you code encode by a pair of dials (for 10x10 keys). Labeling would be a challenge.
I wonder which of Emacs and Vim would have the advantage here.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#23Part of me had hoped that this was some sort of insane mechanical keyboard, where every single key was on the rotary.
Let's see, for 104 keys 3/4" wide, the fully-rotary keyboard would have a circumference of 78" and a diameter of ~25". At that size, it should probably be oriented like a steering wheel.
The holes on my rotary phone are about 1 cm. One can make them nested, since it would have to be custom anyway: starting with the diameter of, say, 3 cm, adding a bit more than 1 cm on each side (3 cm, 4.5 cm, etc), and assuming that at least floor (pi * (1.5 + 2.5 * n - 2) / 1.5) keys fit in the nth such nested ring (1.5 + 2.5 * n is the outer diameter, - 2 is there since the holes won't be on the outer diameter, / 1.5 cm is to leave some space around them; that's not meant to be optimal, just a quick estimate), that'd yield 101 holes/keys with 6 rings, with the outer diameter of 1.5 + 2.5 * 6 = 16.5 cm for the last one. That's a rather small keyboard.
Edit: nested rings would also work for modifier keys.
Edit 2: fixed the formula.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#24LOL. That is a crazy project, but I smiled al the way through reading about it. Its going to be slow going doing numeric key input though. :-)
It might motivate someone to implement an IME for Roman number input.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#25This is so cool, especially for those of us who've used rotary phones. I'd like to see a video of a google voice or other call made using the rotary number pad :)
Just use a rotary cell phone: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
It would be fun for it to support texting using T9 on the dial.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#26Click wheel FTW
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#27Part of me had hoped that this was some sort of insane mechanical keyboard, where every single key was on the rotary.
There were a bunch of cheap typewriters that worked this way, collectively called index typewriters. Here's an example, the simplex:
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#28Rotary phones where used with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch - so they have very simple interface - just generate the number of pulses that is either N or 10-N (I don't remember exactly which one is right). There is also a nice back-story about how it was invented. This is a nice DIY project, but its practicality is questionable. Choosing a number on rotary phones is very slow, as you need to wait til…
It's N, from what I recall from my rotary mobile: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
In New Zealand it was 10-N!
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#29I NEED a rotary dial as a fidget toy.
Re: Rotary Keyboard
#30Nice project! > Due to debouncing troubles, it seems to be double-reading each pulse. At some point I should throw a scope on it to confirm what the problem is, but it works quite adequately as-is. (My first try only had a 10ms delay, which empirically resulted in septuple-reading each pulse…) Needless to say, this is not the canonical way to count pulses. A more typical and accurate loop would look like if digitalRe…
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