It has been an exciting few weeks for me personally. I have two new keyboards, including my first one with an alpine switch, an old Ti / 99A keyboard with a Futaba MD switch, and two original cherry switches (oh, my God, they click so well!), but my keyboard related contingency is enough, and then there is the sound of click!
Put my pedal on the metal
Sports savant elite tripod. This is your foot keyboard! I learned this kinesis savant elite three legged pedal from kindness. It works, but I don’t like the way it’s programmed – left arrow, right arrow and right mouse click. I easily found manuals and drivers on the kinesis website, but soon I knew that I needed a 32-bit computer to program. At that time, Kenneth never wrote an updated driver for the original savant elite pedal. They just launched a new one, and people had to pay another $200 or think of other ways.
I just got out of the 32-bit computer, so I tried to run this program in XP compatible mode as described in the manual, but it just didn’t work. Oh, the manual says that if you don’t do it correctly, you can build it with bricks, so it’s strange and terrible. At this time, I began to realize how easy it was to open it and replace the controller with something more modern. Once I entered, I saw that all three switches used JST plugs and right angle headers. Then I thought hey, why not reuse this setting? I may need to make a new board, but how great would it be to insert the JST of these pedals into my own board?
But I don’t have to make a new board! It turns out that raspberry PI Pico has enough GPIO pins and distributed grounding pins, so I can disconnect the welding of the head from the kinesis controller and stick all three groups of pins to one side of Pico. I hardly screwed the lid back on the fence, but it was worth it.
This set of pedals is much faster than my all plastic shift pedals. It’s made of steel, and the pedal is really strong enough to wear shoes, although I’m more like a sock foot typist. So far, I like it. I’m used to using the pedal to shift gears, so I assign it to the middle pedal as a reference point. Press Ctrl on the left pedal and ALT on the right pedal. My only complaint is that the switch doesn’t click, so I don’t get the auditory feedback I’m used to. I’ll consider replacing them with some heavy key switches, such as cherry green. It’s a little difficult to distinguish the pedals without feeling, so I have a viscose felt furniture ring as a temporary homing device. At the same time, I want to use something cooler, such as a half bouncing ball.
Look at this: keycap playground
As part of [riskable] efforts to build a full 3D printing keyboard, they built a keycap amusement park in openscad, which is actually more like a large entertainment complex with go karts, Mini Golf and bowling. But, you know, for fun. You want your hat to look like a broken accordion bellows? Of course (can you imagine how fun it would be to pick up those keycaps when you were thinking about the next line?)
The playground is very big and is now open to the public. You can see in the following demo video how powerful it is for customizing everything from saucers to fillet radii to legends. Currently, it handles DSA and DCA profiles, but [risk] says it’s fairly easy to make new profiles. If you think this is cool, take a look at [riskable] 3D printing maglev switches, which will be installed under these unique key covers.
Hot spots in the future: the transformation takes place in Marcin wichary
I’ve always wanted to tell you about this upcoming book. I don’t think it’s meaningful to wait any longer, even though it won’t expire until 2022.
When I was studying Dvorak in August and looking for pictures, I met a useful twitter (Marcin wichary), a typesetter in San Francisco, who was studying a book on the complete history of keyboards, including typewriters.
Over the past 18 months, I have received regular updates about this book from [Marcin]’s low-frequency mailing list. Far more than updates, each provides an interesting lesson, from skeuomorphs to moire lines, because they are related to printing photos. If these updates are any indication, it will be very comprehensive and full of wonderful photos. I can’t wait to get this book!
This is not the first music typewriter, but it is one of the early typewriters. Nokobrick music typewriter was produced in Cologne, Germany, and was used from 1910 to 1917.
The interesting thing about this machine is that the position of the pressure plate is determined by a scale, which helps to accurately place notes and symbols. At first, these machines used pre printed paper with staff lines, but later versions also used cross bars.
Nocoblicks uses an interchangeable type of wheel designed by Remington competitor George blickensderfer – one for notes and the other for letters. Simply replace the typing wheel and flick the lever, it can print lyrics. For some reason, noclobick’s sales were not good. When blikensdiver died in 1917, his model wheel was discontinued, which actually killed all the machines that used it.
Icmyi: salute to giant F key
A huge 3D printed key switch, which can send f to pay tribute. The bad boy shot the top of R / all when posting. We must give you our photos as soon as possible. It doesn’t make a click, but it’s great.
[jaryd] even made his own spring for the beast with a drill bit and a 3D printed cylinder. But the best part must be how it works: by activating a conventional size key switch connected to Arduino.