Building a Keyboard
blog.fsck.com
Building a Keyboard
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Building a Keyboard
#2I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter.
I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text that appears on a screen in front of you while the iPads are busily figuring out how far your fingers are moving and 'tuning' where the other keys should be done. Once you've done like 50 words error free it beeps and send that off. Shapeways makes the cover, Albert PCB makes a circuit board, and you order key switches and diodes from a distributor. Boom a custom keyboard designed by you for you.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#3I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter. I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text th…
This is brilliant. A smart keyboard program. I'd buy it.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#4I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter. I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text th…
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which are a bastard to code.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#5I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter. I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text th…
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which are a bastard to code.
Aren't those things only a problem because keyboards are being mass-produced? Companies are cutting costs by using less components which introduce these kind of problems. If you're building your own custom keyboard you're not going to care if it costs you a bit more, especially if it means you can avoid these problems from the start.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#6I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter. I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text th…
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which are a bastard to code.
The cool thing about the modern world is that incredibly talented people have already written decent opensource keyboard firmware. But I'll get to that in Part 2 of the writeup :)
Re: Building a Keyboard
#7I love articles like these, this stuff isn't that hard and its way more fun than other ways to spend time (my opinion of course). Making a PCB for a keyboard is really really straight forward too. I bet we could do that on Upverter. I really like the idea that you could use something like an iPad. (or better two iPads) rest your hands on the screen in what are your natural "home row" position. Then touch type text th…
I've thought about doing something like that. Though I believe that what you want to be doing is using hand measurements and a slightly more standard design. I want to get a few of my own keyboard designs under my belt before I start making promises, though.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which are a bastard to code.
Aren't those things only a problem because keyboards are being mass-produced? Companies are cutting costs by using less components which introduce these kind of problems. If you're building your own custom keyboard you're not going to care if it costs you a bit more, especially if it means you can avoid these problems from the start.
Yeah I know just enough about hardware to be dangerous but I think you can stick 6 16-bit GPIO expanders off of an I2C or SPI bus and address every switch individually. Makes no sense for mass production but for diy it's $10 in parts or something
Re: Building a Keyboard
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't those things only a problem because keyboards are being mass-produced? Companies are cutting costs by using less components which introduce these kind of problems. If you're building your own custom keyboard you're not going to care if it costs you a bit more, especially if it means you can avoid these problems from the start.
Yeah I know just enough about hardware to be dangerous but I think you can stick 6 16-bit GPIO expanders off of an I2C or SPI bus and address every switch individually. Makes no sense for mass production but for diy it's $10 in parts or something http://octopart.com/mcp23s17-e%2Fso-microchip-470569
Scan rate is shit though if you have to use spi/i2c.
Re: Building a Keyboard
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PCB is the easy bit. Making the firmware which delivers your keypresses down a PS2/USB pipe is not. You have to consider things like n-key rollover and ghosting/blocking particularly when using matrix encoding/scanning which are a bastard to code.
The cool thing about the modern world is that incredibly talented people have already written decent opensource keyboard firmware. But I'll get to that in Part 2 of the writeup :)
Excellent. I look forward to reading about that :)