EDIT: There's a typo in the alt text. It's supposed to read "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll design a keyboard.' Now they have two problems"
@zzt@foone I recently had the terrible idea of making a ten-hundred keyboard, with one key for each of the top 1000 English words. So far I have resisted.
fun thing about this keyboard: I designed it on my laptop, which is currently stuck at work unpowered. I never shared the files anywhere, so I'm currently at home and can't program the keyboard because I have no idea which pins are which... unless I REVERSE ENGINEER MY OWN KEYBOARD!
This is for my scanning job at the internet archive. I'm scanning microfiche.
The left buttons are for the different number of images to take of a single sheet. I gotta adjust that so that we don't take a bunch of pictures of nothing.
Login, well, logs me into the program. Fill imputs the itemid (which is needed occasionally for boring technical reasons), Print reprints the last label, Delete deletes the last scan (like if I hit 8 and it turns out it's a 12), Auto is for an experimental feature where it assumes I'm as fast at handling fiche as the scanner is at scanning it, Enhance is for lightening up dark slides so I can be sure they're all scanned properly, and done finishes the batch and prints a label
basically the idea is that I don't have to deal with a regular keyboard or mouse to do the scanning. This is faster and gives me more desk space to devote to handling the actual fiche, since they gotta be unsleeved and resleeved and labeled and put away
so I can better turn my scanning into an assembly line, where I primarily focus on moving around the fiche, labels, and envelopes, and never have to deal with keyboard/mouse
@foone hey, I used to play organ, with two 55 key manuals and a full size foot pedal register (27 pedal keys) ... and I'd play with heels and toes of both feet (and two hands, too), so there's that ...
@foone ignoring the chips, the keyboard is probably one of the most complex peripheral of a computer, from an industrial design and production pov. I do remember the pain ZX Spectrum Next team endured, from the membrane to the key design and plastic moulding, the number of iterations, seriously, industrial designing and production of a keyboard can be truly complex! Unless you resort to pre-existing already available comercial components like mechanical key switches and so on.
@foone I decided to side-step the DIY keyboard craze and bought a fancy "ergonomic" split keybaord.
It cost 5 bucks and the right half isn't working.
It was a keyboard project all along.🙃
@ljrk I highly recommend giving it a try! keyboards are very simple to design, especially since there's lots of guides out there that can walk you through any of the slightly tricky bits like "where do I put diodes? do I need diodes?"
@foone The complex part – apparently – is to get hold of the TOPRE stuff since those aren't individual switches and AFAIK there are only Realforce, HHKB and some Leopolds who use them.
But, yes, I probably should look into it... some day :3
Your post definitely pushed up my motivation for that 0:-)
@ljrk cool! Feel free to @ me if you run into any trouble with it. I am not an expert on making PCBs but I might know enough to point you in the right direction
@foone have been using the keyboard I designed ~2 years ago and just came around to actually making a case for it.
I am ashamed of myself, almost as much as reading the schematic for the RGB rotary encoder backwards and having to do this badly done rework not once, but four times...
(I know the PCB is dirty, I swear I'm working on a case)
(I should really redo that rework)
@foone Well, every mouse I bought in the past 15 years fails in the same exact way, so if I can find hot swap sockets that work, I know what I'm doing next.