Live data from Hacker News

Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

billiam.org

81–85 of 85 posts

Re: Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

#81
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the feedback of smartphones? Especially those prior to the very recent vibrate on touch People want to type, and they want to do it quickly. Tactile feedback is nice... but most people do not engage in typing for the fun of it. The primary concerns for this are input reliability, ease & speed of setup, and learning curve. You aren't using such a thing to replace your desktop keyboard. You're using it to replace…

Smartphones work to some extent because they are relatively light and you hold them in your hand. This means it is very much not a rigid surface. Typing on a projective keyboard on e.g. a desk is very unpleasant, because you are pecking a hard, rigid surface with your fingers.

Sure, but at least in my imagination, the primary use-case doesn't care. The primary use-case being that you have a surface, but no/inaccessible laptop/desktop, and you need to type up something long and quickly; perhaps debugging a production problem as a sysadmin, or trying to stop an email chain from going out of control as a PM, or trying to respond a high priority client immediately, during lunch or any other out-of-office reason. Or hell, trying to respond to an HN thread with a long-form comment before the conversation dies out.

I can't trust emails on a smartphones because they're so error-prone. If this thing is reliable in its input, and easy to setup, then the "unpleasantness" of typing on a desk is very low on the list of concerns, unless it's extremely unpleasant, if not outright painful.

And unless you're a hunt-and-pecker (which couldn't feasibly use the tool in the first place, afaict), I don't see how it could be that unpleasant. And playing with the idea on my desk.. it's not the greatest feeling, but its hardly a showstopper.

It's not a general keyboard replacement. It's a few-usecase and higher-constraint keyboard replacement; the only thing that matters is whether it supports those specific fewer usecases significantly better than the currently available alternatives, because it doesn't hinder using the general tool as a fallback.

Re: Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

#82
post #2

Saw this alternate entry device announced at CES: https://www.charachorder.com/ SelfieType, using a camera to watch your fingers, looks even more futuristic: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-selfie-type-demo-vi...

Charachorder looks like a modern attempt to produce something similar to the Datahand (availability was always limited, and the company has gone defunct by now): http://www.atpm.com/7.05/datahand.shtml The biggest issue with these devices is the huge learning curve upfront. You need to invest a lot of time to get to a point where the productivity / speed claims get true. I learned Dvorak many years ago, and I would n…

> Type individual characters like a keyboard or press all the letters in a word simultaneously and CharaChorder's internal processor will automatically arrange them on your screen in real time. THIS ALLOWS USERS TO TYPE 5X FASTER THAN IS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE ON ANY KEYBOARD

You typed "anagram" but it spit out "nag a ram". Hmm. There goes the "5x".

Re: Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

#83
post #59

This is a pretty novel use of the low-profile Choc switches. I like it. QMK supports ARM very strangely, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. They use ChibiOS as an RTOS to basically schedule USB code alongside QMK, and then they get ChibiOS's USB support for free. (Note that on many of these ARM chips, the USB is actually handled in hardware; you just need to get the right bytes into the right memory a…

> The model of flashing firmware to change the key layout also seems crazy to me, in an era where you can easily enumerate as a flash drive and just drag a JSON-encoded keymap onto it to adjust the layout. (Or just edit it live, a la CircuitPython.) Are there any keyboards that have that functionality? I know Logitech allows you to save macro key info to the hardware. However, last I saw that was only for specific ma…

I think TEX are innovating bigtime here. Have a look at the TEX Kodachi web configurator for example - their keyboards use exactly this mechanism for layout adjustment.

Re: Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

#84
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the latter basically just a projection keyboard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard So, futuristic from the 90s, was available already and flopped (because it is much more uncomfortable than actual keys).

With the camera, doesn’t that open up the possibility for other gestures? You could do more than just tap, for example. Pinch and zoom, scroll up scroll down, Next page,… You could also create chords with two hands.

Has been done already in the leap motion controller. Also done before with the microsoft kinect.

Neat for some purposes, but not new and did not catch on.

Re: Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad

#85

This is a pretty novel use of the low-profile Choc switches. I like it. QMK supports ARM very strangely, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. They use ChibiOS as an RTOS to basically schedule USB code alongside QMK, and then they get ChibiOS's USB support for free. (Note that on many of these ARM chips, the USB is actually handled in hardware; you just need to get the right bytes into the right memory a…

The flashing issue is hopefully going to be solved by VIA: https://caniusevia.com
Post reply on HN