Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

electronicmaterialsoffice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 688 posts

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#641

Post by what-imright »

zucked wrote: post #453
what-imright wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London isn’t a technology hub and that they put made in london to imitate Apple made in California, is pretentious to the nth degree, and that’s exactly how I see the english. they don’t make shit, and what little they do design comes with fireworks and their national gd anthem. And nobody bring up ARM, because the ARM of today was designed in Japan, not the uk

Having such a broad strokes approach to English manufacturing/design is awfully elitist. It's okay to be proud of your successes - they've contributed a lot. We tend to focus on the abject failures (eg British Leyland) but without things like the Merlin engine, the P51 wouldn't have been as dominant during WWII.

No, england lost the war and was saved by the US

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#642

Post by nxdmum »

thegeomaster wrote: post #297
nxdmum wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was consistently hitting 40-50 on MonkeyType - but while transporting the keyboard - i damaged it a bit. so now out of touch. I was practising about 20 mins every day for about 50 days - with misses on days when i had a lot of work. But i know that my speed would increase. Now when i see words - i can see the trigrams and I can visually break them down. I am confident i would be able to reach 70 if i practice more.…

Interesting. To me, even 70 sounds quite low compared to the effort involved, and probably more mentally taxing. Out of curiosity, what is your motivation behind the experiment?

The initial mental effort is high. But the trigrams are hashed to the letters on the keyboard. so "con" is hashed to for example Lower + C. So that helps. Also - after sometime you start seeing the common 3/4-grams - tion , the, and etc. Then it starts to become like a game with a dopamine feedback loop. Every time you hit 2 keys and get 3 or 4 letters out - you start getting a high.

>Out of curiosity, what is your motivation behind the experiment? I watched a video of NoThisIsJohn typing at 200+ words per minute. I know i cant hit those speeds, but i was wondering what hacks i could do to the keyboard to get as fast as i can.

I just wanted to hack typing. I even thought of double pressing keys - for example bigrams. I came up with a new layout. When i read about the norman layout - it is criticised for same finger bigrams. But what i thought is, if I put the bigram keys near each other - then I would be able to press those with a single finger press - if the finger overlaps the 2 keys on the edge. but for that you need key wells - even at the edges of the keys - to give that tactile feeling. Similar to what the thinkpad has at the edge of the G, H and B keys . This would allow you to press 2 keys (and maybe more with a correctly designed keycap set) at the same time. But I would have to design new keycaps for something like this. And I thought of writing to Signature plastic - but I dont think i have that much money right now - but maybe a little later.

I also thought of 3 dimensional approach. Which is to insert vowel keys between 2 keys - exactly like the thinkpad Red trackball - but at a lower height as compared to the bigram consonants. This would require a special MCU and n-key rollover detection - to check if the 3rd key is pressed. If you want to press 3 keys - you would have to press deeper - so that the deeper sandwiched vowel key also gets depressed.

It would need a new PCB design and I started reading up and watching videos on PCB design and Keyboard design.

Anyways, If any Keyboard designer is reading this - reach out to me

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#643

Post by redhale »

cantSpellSober wrote: post #570

Cool, congrats and thanks for sharing, we need more competition here 1. raised/indented keys will get dirty really fast, an option without would sell me 2. 2-device pairing is great, your competitors have 3 though 3. hot-swap keycaps would be a huge sell 4. nice typography, why isn't the logo in it? take off the logo 5. replace the empty area with home => end 6. 3 modifiers on the left, 3 right please! (not 4-left/2-…

HN comments never disappoint

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#644

Post by nxdmum »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #377
thegeomaster wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. To me, even 70 sounds quite low compared to the effort involved, and probably more mentally taxing. Out of curiosity, what is your motivation behind the experiment?

I'm assuming we're referring to 70 words per minute here? In that case I'd have to agree that while 70 is plenty fast for most practical applications, it seems low for the amount of complexity involved. For me, I don't type faster than I do because I can't consistently move my fingers faster while maintaining high accuracy. However, that is without any n-grams or other complexities. OTOH, if you trade off required mo…

Yes. I would switch over when i reached 70 words per minute.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#645

Post by dang »

swamp40 wrote: post #623
dang wrote: post #521

This is a cool project but there needs to be more than a signup page for it to qualify as a Show HN - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html . We've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.

I'm wondering if you shouldn't have different rules for hardware than for software? For instance, what if somebody told him Apple had patented indented buttons and he couldn't use them? I see lots of good improvement ideas here in the comments. Actually tooling up all these parts will cost him $100,000 before a single person can "try" one - so obviously he needs all the suggestions he can get before that stage. Or, m…

We do have different rules for hardware! - that's in the same document: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. There should still be more than a signup page though.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#646

Post by hypertele-Xii »

minimaul wrote: post #256
smeej wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The font thing is bigger than people might think. As soon as I saw the number row, I had such an immediate and harsh reaction to it that it surprised me. I almost couldn't believe that was the cause, but when I waited for the device to turn around again, that was definitely it. I don't even have to look at my fingers often, but I wouldn't be able to stand walking by those numbers on a regular basis. I don't think I'v…

I agree - for me I like the keyboard as a whole, but the bits that bug me are: - the rotary encoder. I don't see what the aim of this is - what's the intended usecase? - the font on the numbers. I feel like it should match the font used on the other keys instead, which I think I like but it's hard to tell because there's no good actual picture of the keyboard as a whole - drop the model name on the right. I get that…

> the rotary encoder. I don't see what the aim of this is - what's the intended usecase?

I actually have a separate USB rotary encoder next to my keyboard. Glad to see it integrated into the design. It's like a more comfortable mouse wheel. If you need to scroll a lot (editing audio, for example), the constant "scroll a little, lift finger, scroll a little, lift finger" routine gets old real fast. But if you've got a wide enough knob, you can just spin it around indefinitely in one circular motion.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#647

Post by Naracion »

barrenko wrote: post #479
interleave wrote: post #423

This looks fantastic! A thought-experiment that may interest you coming from someone (me) who already has happily spent several hundreds of dollars on mechanical keyboards and uses them every single day: Let's imagine the keyboard could be bought today as-is with a simple "Buy Now" button and price was no concern. The two main reasons I would _still_ hesitate to hit that button are: 1. I absolutely and undoubtedly ne…

I hate to tell you - and this is a common "theme" on HN - but you are probably not the target audience.

The creator of the keyboard literally posted this to ask for feedback from HN users. I'm pretty sure in this instance HN users _are_ the target audience--or at least part of it. In any case, feedback is helpful at this stage (and is sought by OP).

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#648

Post by hypertele-Xii »

paledot wrote: post #338

I want to hear more about what you expect the rotary encoder to be used for. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it happen, so - why? I feel like there must be some interesting use cases, but I'm drawing a blank.

Practical examples: Scrolling a soundwave in Audacity. Scrolling the sequencer in a DAW like FL Studio. Binding it to a MIDI control to play live music. Rotating a 3D model.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#649

Post by hypertele-Xii »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #395
paledot wrote: post #338

I want to hear more about what you expect the rotary encoder to be used for. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it happen, so - why? I feel like there must be some interesting use cases, but I'm drawing a blank.

A rotary encoder can be mapped to the mouse wheel for scrolling documents, reducing the need to move the hand to the mouse to perform that. As an aside, if that sounds interesting, you can do this with some of the cheap USB volume knobs available from Amazon, etc. that have a configuration menu, e.g. https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/setup-menu-uses-text-editor-...

I bought one exactly like that, used AutoHotKey to configure it for various productivity applications. By default it mimics my mouse wheel, for more comfortable scrolling.

Re: I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

#650

Post by adastra22 »

interleave wrote: post #533
adastra22 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Das Keyboard: https://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-ultimate/

Thank you for the tip! My take on "ze Germans", "psycho-acoustics" and "badass typists" First off: As a native German-speaker, I always have to giggle with the whole "Das" Keyboard. "Das Keeboahd. Jaaaa." Secondly: As silly as "...the psycho-acoustic experience [...] an unmatched typing experience" sounds. I know exactly what they're talking about. And it matters to me. Maybe, as a neurodivergent person, it's because…

I wish Vat19 did a Das Keyboard promo with Hans Gretel, a la Das Beer Boot. Would have been amazing.
Post reply on HN