Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!
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Comments?
The fsociety Keyboard
As a matter of fact, people nowadays can easily spend >10 hours a day in front of a computer; wiggling the mouse, click and clacking the keyboard, those things are just inseparable part of our modern life. HID such as keyboard has simply become an integral part of the society and also our...
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No case, missing keys, annoying LEDs, awkwardly placed thumbsticks, a bunch of "security" features...no thanks. I have a wireless keyboard with a trackball I use for the living room PC and it looks a lot more comfortable to use (and the AA batteries are easily replaced).
Might fit well on those "dumbest tech thingy of the year" lists.
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@scholrlea Yawn.
The constraints of manufacturing economics prevent any real innovation on the part that matters, the keys.
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I definitely want my keyboard to store passwords because there's no way someone could steal my keyboard from my desk. At least the passwords it stores with no master password are encrypted with rot26 or something.
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@greybeard said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
@scholrlea Yawn.
The constraints of manufacturing economics prevent any real innovation on the part that matters, the keys.
Not a fan of Cherry MX keyswitches?
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@jbert I'm a fan of this sort of thing:
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Mechanical
Wireless
It looks awful. I bet it will be really popular
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I'm surprised they didn't throw a PiZero in for good luck...
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@greybeard said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
@jbert I'm a fan of this sort of thing:
But that's no longer innovative, as that design is just dead (sadly).
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@jaloopa said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
Mechanical
I'm offended, all my keyboards are mechanical!
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@jbert said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
I'm offended
I don't give a shit
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All the "features" can be more conveniently implemented on the computer, with a 10$ keyboard, and then you get to have them on every computer you use, including laptops with their own built in keyboards.
LEDs are nice for decoration, but someone who uses a computer for a longer time already knows where the keys are without looking.
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Internet of thing thingy
To enable independent internet access, ESP8266 Wifi dongle was added on-board.
Local wireless communication (Bluetooth 4.0 & LORA)
Talks wireless-ly with local networks that you've setup is now possible with Bluetooth and growingly popular LORA network on-the-go.Great idea, store all your passwords on some Internet Of Shit device that's continuously shouting over every wireless protocol there is, protected by all the security an Arduino chip can muster.
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@ben_lubar said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
I definitely want my keyboard to store passwords because there's no way someone could steal my keyboard from my desk. At least the passwords it stores with no master password are encrypted with rot26 or something.
Throw KeePass on the chip inside and it... could work? At least you could store your Windows password in there...
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@scholrlea said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
Comments?
The fsociety Keyboard
As a matter of fact, people nowadays can easily spend >10 hours a day in front of a computer; wiggling the mouse, click and clacking the keyboard, those things are just inseparable part of our modern life. HID such as keyboard has simply become an integral part of the society and also our...
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I kinda like the idea of having an analog joystick in your keyboard. It might make a nice complement to the mouse in some situations (casual gaming?).
Everything else is garbage. Especially the LEDs. What an ugly thing. I hate it.
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@jaloopa said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
@jbert said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
I'm offended
I don't give a shit
You should eventually. Holding onto that shit is unhealthy by definition...
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@anonymous234 said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
I kinda like the idea of having an analog joystick in your keyboard. It might make a nice complement to the mouse in some situations (casual gaming?).
I'm sure that, unless they really shit the bed on programmability, you can set it up for that, but by default it's this:
2 X Thumb Analog Joystick
On the left side simulates the mouse movement while the right side trigger the arrow keys.
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Get on my level
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Well, it does have the upside that it should be easier to keep clean than most keyboards. So hey, it has that going for it. Can't think of anything else though.
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@jbert said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
But that's no longer innovative, as that design is just dead (sadly).
As I said, manufacturing econonmics. That design is a bitch to manufacture.
But it's pretty much the last innovative keyboard. All we've gotten since have been various bits of bling attached to the same old standardized keys.
Okay, maybe the Touch Bar.
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@greybeard said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
The constraints of manufacturing economics prevent any real innovation on the part that matters, the keys.
I am not convinced there is a need for innovation in keyboards. They work well with human hands, and these don't change.
Just like the shape of writing tools is similar throughout thousands of years.
Innovation can create new input methods, for example completely 3D vector inputs in VR:
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Having purchased a Das Keyboard Pro (Brown switches, because I'm not evil) to use at work, I can say that while I like red switches better, just going for either is all the improvement a normal keyboard design can really get.
New input devices that aren't keyboards can still innovate, obviously. But adding dumb knobs and screens helps no one.
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@adynathos Having had RSI, I know from experience the flat keyboard can stand improvement. They do not work all that well with human hands.
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@blek said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
Get on my level
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How do you even use that thing? Where do you place hands!?
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@tsaukpaetra The friend who sent me this link said he intends to do exactly that when he builds his own version, actually.
However, he really does have what he sees as a decent reason for a keyboard with a built-in keylogger: his SO is an author, and she wants something that will record the keystrokes independent of the computer, in case of a crash or disk failure while she's writing. I get the impression she was the one who asked him, rather than him being nosy.
OTOH, I know she has RSI, which is why I pointed out several of the DIY designs for chorded keyboards that are around. I don't know if he's intending to combine this with that at all, though (I need to ask next time I'm chatting with him).
Speaking of chorded or ergonomic keyboards, here are some of the ones I found:
- USB/Bluetooth Chording Keyboard
- Wireless Chorded Keyboard, covered by Hackaday here
- Matthias' Chording Keyboard
- Chording Hybrid Keyboard
- ErgoDox
- ASETNIOP
There also have been a bunch of crowdfunding projects for commercial chording keyboards, such as DecaTXT and the Chordite, but none of them seem to really take off AFAIK.
@Greybeard: speaking of which, I gather that the DataHand isn't a chorded keyboard per se, but it does follow some of the same principles, just taking them a lot further. Are there any particular reasons why the DataHand is significantly more difficult to build than , say, the Twiddler, the BAT, or any of the DIY designs, aside from just the complexity (and the polish of the design - I hadn't seen it before, but I must say that from what little I can tell based on the photos, it does looks well-crafted)?
While the sort of designs you generally see for DIY alternate keyboards are often crude, lacking in imagination and polish, and not very durable, that's because Makerspace stuff is mostly done for the hell of it - climbing a mountain because it is there. It is possible to do more, it just takes significantly more effort than most hobbyists want to do on their own - but once a good design is out there, you often see a lot of work on refining it.
I would still think it would be possible to build something like this with a combination of off the shelf parts and 3D printed components (if you have a printer that can work with suitable materials). Yes, arranging the various actuators in differing alignments would take a lot of fine layout work, but... if someone had the money and time to spend, I would think that it could be done on a DIY basis. So... expensive and time consuming, but possible, right?
I gather that there is more to this than meets the eye, though. Could you please elaborate? Is the expense and labor (which certainly could make it unfeasible to make them commercially) the main problem you see, or is there more that I am missing?
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@scholrlea The DataHand has a lot of different components that are unique to it. There is a lot of adjustability to fit different hand shapes, leading to complexity.
The actuators are magnetic, which they claimed required a third of the force that conventional actuators do.
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@greybeard Hmmn, OK. I am not an expert at maker type stuff, so I have NFC about the availability of such magnetic actuators, or how current-gen actuators available for DIY development fare compared to those available professionally in 1995.
WRT the individual fits and customizations, however, I would expect that for someone who knows what is needed, the one-off, maker style of design would do better than a conventional manufacturing approach - a given unit could be precisely calibrated at construction time, though the cost would be enormous. The 'knowledgeable enough' part sounds like a bigger issue than to cost part, though, and that in turn comes down to motivation - someone who was motivated enough, and had time to spare, could learn the publicly available information, if nothing else.
I could almost see it as a kind of boutique business, in a way, something like an upscale eyeglasses shop - you come in for a fitting, test a few examples out, chose a design, get measurements taken, come back a day or two later to test out your custom unit, and if it suits you, sold. It would be crazy expensive, but if it is solid and reliable enough that you wouldn't need to replace it until your needs changed, it would be worth it. Especially if it were suited for off-table operation, like the Twiddler.
Hell, someone selling one-of-a-kind, personally fitted wireless handheld HIDs that replace keyboards? The hipsters would go apeshit over that (and people like me, too). TO KICKSTARTER!
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@gąska said in Look on fsociety's keyboard, ye mighty, and despair!:
Where do you place hands!?
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