Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've built a tiny hand-held keyboard

github.com

411 pointsmafik107 comments

I bet you didn't knew you can use modelling clay (as opposed to 3d printing) to make nice devices by hand :)

Maybe record a short video with the hand typing in the foreground and a screen in the background. To give an idea of the typing effort and speed.

yes one video pls

I'm very confused now about it's use. Is it a keyboard for typing letters/numbers or a keyboard for making music? The fact TFA talks about chords and arpeggios made me think it was for music programming. I'm well confused on it's purpose now.

Micro keyboards often use chords for extending functions? Alt and/or F4 might be a chord, for example

I'm also wondering whether the presence of arpeggios and rolled chords is a benefit, or if it makes it harder to pick up. Eg tentatively assembling a chord one key at a time because you're learning must look like a rolled chord, right?

It's for letters/numbers. The mechanical keyboard community has adopted phrases like "chord" and "arpeggio" because they refer to analogous things in the typing world ("pressing multiple keys at the same time" and "pressing multiple keys in quick succession", respectively).

In keyboards with a limited number of keys (such as in TFA) they become especially crucial to being able to express the full complement of "standard" letters, numbers, and symbols.

Chords and arpeggios apply to typing as well, is how stenographers type so fast.

It's for text input, I believe, but their use of the icon (in the title) certainly adds confusion.

There's all kinds of text keyboard mappings including some like court reporter's input devices.

i don't actually know a lot about split/ergo/mech's and don't know of any non-rabbit-holey info sites but you can learn a bit about 1 and 2 handed split ergo's and ZMK/QMK firmware mappings at https://old.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/

ZMK's docs are pretty good https://zmk.dev/docs/keymaps

This is peak hacker. I love this. I love that it's COTS components, I love that the contoured bit is clay. An efficient build.

Bravo! Apparently they are known as keyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyer#Computer_interface_keyer...

Edit: Circa 1980 when I was young and impressionable, my father's buddy had a WriteHander and since then I have loved this kind of thing.

http://ibnteo.klava.org/keyboard/writehander

The writehander link has an image that is clearly not a righthander user. Much more of a southpaw targeted device

"Available for either right or left hand..." - the second sentence beneath that image

Dude, this is so cool! I've had something like this floating around my cluttered headspace for ages, and it always sort of floats to the surface during the rare times when I do some light sysadmin work via Termux on my phone.

Another thing that jumps to mind is the minichord[1], a nominally open-source synth/instrument.

I just love seeing these little devices people can come up with given the proliferation of the necessary devboards and tools. Nice project.

As I hate tapping on glass, mistyping non-stop, I’m always evaluating options. This is an awesome project and a great write up, but we want more! :) Please consider published a video so we might see it in action (also showing the build process would be appreciated).

Totally rad.

Now you just need and Oculus and you can turn yourself into Johnny Mnemonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzRjtvMQds4&t=63s

Very cool! Azeron makes these but not as hand-held (might be of interest for them?), and much more keys. Because they have so many keys, you can do some easy chording and what not, allowing you to completely replace a keyboard with one. Which is great for people who only have one arm/hand, including war veterans.

They have a 60 days return policy which I find very generous. They're based in Latvia. Some parts are 3D printed. Their website [1].

I mention them since I happen to own a Cyro, which is an outlier to their portfolio: a vertical _mouse_ with a lot of buttons. The only decent one I'm aware of, and the choice is very limited in that space. I'm happy, though I'd love to have it wireless. I tried modding it with USB2BT but ran into some issues, YMMV.

[1] https://www.azeron.eu

Cute. I use a Bluehand (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/08/08/1230) and have often thought it would be nice to not have to set it down someplace...

You use it as a daily driver? To type text or code as well?

Not as a daily driver, mostly to take notes on the couch or when traveling. Vim on it is a fun experience, but not amazingly productive.

Great to see someone trying to innovate. It's surprising humans haven't come up with a better input method than an old school keyboard. Who would have thought that a typewriter from 1874 would still be so visible on a modern Macbook!

Surely, there has to be a better way.

I think it is a momentum problem. You learn to use a keyboard when you are young/inexperienced, because you need to learn something, and then learning something new is hard and slows you down, so you stick with what you know. It's doubly hard to both create a new layout and learn it.

I would offer ‘swipe’ keyboards as one example of something new. “better” is subjective, they are certainly not faster than normal typing, but offer much more flexibility for typing with one hand. But even then they still rely on the old qwerty layout. Not sure how widely adopted they are but they come standard on IOS and Android keyboards

I would argue that the DataHand/Svalboard counts.

Haven't read comments yet but I just now excitedly `lightbulbed a MAFIK ][', that seems simple and completes the `other side': a tactile terminal, seems obvious, so I apologize if this is redundant. Billions of free recycled tiny motors tipped w/ eccentric cellphone vibrators at different freqs, if audible some other silent buzzer/solinoid/..piezo(flat form factor..input also?!), smaller earbud's speaker elements, per finger contact. Variable freq each buzzer may also equal entire space of chording combos. Serves deaf/blind equally well.

its an interesting concept.

Nice work! I'm happy to see that some folks are still interested in wearable computing.

The Twiddler gives me hand cramps, so I might give this one a shot. (It's low on the pile, however.)

Having had a twiddler since they came out, seeing this topic the first ting I did was search the thread to see who mentioned it first :) Not sure of the timeline, probably a little after that the Playstation Glove looked like a great idea but the reality sucked.

Decades on now but still trying to find wearable computing stuff that can drag modern computing back to the early 90s (spending years trying to recreate the original Private Eye [0] display). Checking that out on wikipedia right now just fired a harmony of so many nostalgia neurons:-

>The Student Electronic Notebook consisted of the Private Eye, Toshiba diskless AIX notebook computers (prototypes), a stylus based input system and a virtual keyboard. It used direct-sequence spread spectrum radio links to provide all the usual TCP/IP based services, including NFS mounted file systems and X11, which all ran in the Andrew Project environment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer#1980s

I would love to see a video of this in action.

I had a similar idea when apple vision pro came out, to be able to code while laying on a couch or bed fully relaxed, but never got to doing it. Neat!

I code this way using the Rayneo Air 3S Pro. Feels like I accomplish more this way because the display is on my head and I can relax.

Do you just type with a regular keyboard then?

I do the same with viture pro xr glasses using a Bluetooth keyboard. It's been great when I'm having neck/back issues that require laying down to recover. The downside being that xr glasses cause a bit more eye strain, which forces the short periodic breaks that I should be taking anyway.

> code while laying on a couch or bed fully relaxed

I wanted this so much I started programming on my phone with Termux. Yes, on a touch screen.

I wrote an entire graphical Go-game tree based editor in Lisp, with a stylus on PalmPilot. I considered it an artistic expression.

I wrote my own lisp interpreter in C inside Termux. My language might be the first to be born inside a smartphone.

> with a stylus

Respect.

I had vague ideas, a few years ago, of integrating a keyboard into the handlebar of a recumbent tricycle (it would need to not interfere with braking, but there’s a fair bit of leeway left for useful design). Modelling clay had indeed not occurred to me! Nor had I realised how chorded keyboards could hook directly to GPIO pins. If I’d seen this back then, I probably would have gone ahead and prototyped something right away. Alas for this vision (though not alas in general!), I got married instead and my long-distance cycling days are behind me. But I’m still rather tempted to play with this, it looks fun and surprisingly straightforward, even if I can’t immediately see a good practical purpose in my life. Just last week I happened to see a box of epoxy modelling clay and wondered what it would be like to use… though I suspect it might harden too quickly for this.

Steve Roberts beat you to it, back in the 80s.

https://bikepacking.com/plog/steve-roberts-computing-across-...

More details, from the man himself:

https://microship.com/winnebiko-ii/

https://microship.com/bicycle-mobile-packeteering/

https://microship.com/first-text-while-driving/

https://microship.com/behemoth/

I think the craziest thing is that almost every feature he built into BEHEMOTH is now covered by the average smartphone (+ a small solar panel).

Yes, but this is way beyond that IMO. Really lovely project that I of course must build

I had never heard of Steve Roberts or these amazing bike projects. Reading up through the development of BEHEMOTH put an huge smile on my face, thank you. Such passion!

If you want to see BEHEMOTH it used to be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'd assume it's still there.

Edit: Yeah! Here's the stuff: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...

What an amazing project this. So many original and inspiring ideas. Thank you for doing this and posting it, I also really love the walkthrough for building the device in a number of days. If you don't mind, could you benchmark your input speed using the device assuming you are now used to it?

I've been on the lookout for a partial keyboard for my left hand for gaming;

Recently, I started trying to play Helldivers 2 online with some family members but find on my mechanical keyboard that I get hand cramp very quickly, most of the keys needed are in bottom-left of the keyboard and I have big hands, and my keys take a lot more pressure than is ideal for gaming.

I bought a Razer Tartarus Pro but found it was basically useless on Linux.

Does anyone here have any suggestions of something that I could use? I tried to use a controller to see if that would help, but no matter what I did I couldn't get any controller (PS5, XBox One S, Switch Pro) to actual provide input to the game under Proton despite working fine in other games.

I'm playing on Steam/Proton on CachyOS.

Try swapping the switches on your keyboard if it allows it? Or try a keyboard with a different layout?

My first mechanical keyboard had cherry mx brown which felt stiff, loud and not too comfortable to type on for long periods of time. I got a pad to try out all kinds of switches and ultimately moved to a split keyboard with kalih silent pink.

I tried an ergonomic keyboard with just 3x10 keys (or rather since it was a split keybaord, 2x3x5). I found that I am unwilling to spend the time to learn how to use it, type special characters, numbers, etc. Especially since most of my training time would need to take place during work, where I didn't want to take that huge initial efficiency hit. In the end, I chose a ZSA Moonlander and I'm super happy with it, even though it might have too many keys for enthusiasts ;)

That being said, I do have a soft spot for handheld hacker keyboards like this. It reminds me of the cyber future we all dreamed of when we were younger, when tech was still cool and exciting. Very cool project!

Learning is actually quite fun once you juice it up. One minute in the tutor should make it clear what I mean: https://mafik.github.io/keyer/ (make sure the sound is on)

For folks who are interested in the UX design of chorded layouts, Artsey and Ardux (https://ardux.io) might be of interest. Artsey is a specific 2x4 one-handed chorded layout (of which Ardux is now a more robust implementation, with optional variations for slightly larger numbers of keys) that borrows a lot from colemak. I'm a big fan.

I particularly appreciate the simplicity of a 2x4 layout — OP's device rocks, but I worry about the ergonomics of thumb movement.

I’m not sure about drinking tea with an 18650 unprotected strapped to your hand like that. The battery should at least have a holder

I want something like this so that I can get rid of the computer workstation and instead use a 8k+8k VR headset on battery

What sort of typing speed do you reach with it?

Hard to say because I'm still stumbling trying to remember a chord most of the time. I'd say 20 wpm when the stumbling is only moderate. I need to get that muscle memory trained!

Did you follow some convention for your chording or make something up yourself?

I kind of wonder if some layout that mimics wasd but uses the thumb buttons to indicate which “row” you are in could be intuitive to people who learned to type conventionally. (The intuition here being that most of us aren’t going to become keyer experts).

No, I didn't experiment with modes almost at all. I had one mode where I mapped the arrows to individual keys but in the end dint't use it - it's faster to enter a chord - especially chords for Ctrl+Arrows are nice.

For a time I made the mappings a little more memorable by forcing two related keys (like a and ą or o and ó) to have their chords differ in just one finger position - and that did work but it lowered the "efficiency estamates" of the generated layouts. In the end I reserved one thumb position for my custom shortcuts and allowed the optimizer to go crazy with all the remaining chords. After playing with both styles I prefer the latter. Entering text feels more a little fast-paced maze solving game where you have to figure out which fingers to move to transition between chords.

Interesting. As a vim fan I think I would be very unhappy with any layout that didn’t have hjkl as my home position. But, of course, the ability to experiment is a huge strength of open source projects.

What a cool project. I grew up playing with modeling clay, but never did anything with those skills. It is fascinating to see them used in something useful like this.

Maybe a scanner of some sort is needed, to share 3D printable versions of clay objects, haha.

In my setup I use Colemak DH mod which loses the Vim arrows but I added a modifier where the 'a' key (left pinky on home row) when held down switches the right home row to arrow keys. Hasn't been an issue.

I always wanted dual gloves like this so I could essentially tap on my legs while sitting down.

There was a product very similar to this in the late 1980s. My uncle invested in the company. But it flopped. I am sorry I cannot remember the name. I do remember skilled typists could use it at least as fast as 2 hand traditional typing.

That tracks. I just don't think there's the sales volume you'd need to manufacture and sell something like this at an adequate profit, and certainly in the 80s it would have been even more difficult to find enough compute and utility in one place without the benefit of Internet services.

Wasn't the Microwriter was it perchance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter

I saw that demoed at Notts Micro Computing Club in the early 80s. IIRC a Microwriter was used to drive input for an Acorn Electron.

Yup. There were drivers for both the Electron and the BBC Micro (required the Model B IIRC, Model A didn't have enough spare RAM for the software)

This looks less aggressive than the one that covers your fist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eklg7CKs57A&t=172s

Check out this design: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20030179178A1/en

I wish they had called it the Mobile Text Entry Radio Device, or Mobile TERD for short. (Since it has a radio transmitter.)

I want a pen shaped gyroscopic mouse to use while watching/interacting with stuff through AR glasses, just needs to point click, right click & two buttons for custom keystrokes

Agree pens are underrated as input over mice. Or for ar (fingers).

Maybe apple will make a pen input for a Vision Pro thing someday… though knowing them it’ll be some crazy vision based tracing system thing that requires special hardware in the headset that would require you to update your Vision Pro to the newest model to use it.

Cool! Did you consider using more compact keys and caps?

No, but it's a great idea. For thumb I'm using a Ctrl-sized keycap - it has the perfect in width where I can avoid pressing the buttons on the sides. But for other fingers, the regular-sized switches and caps feel a little too widely spaced... Something 15% smaller than standard keycaps would be perfect.

I was playing with this same idea. Even the clay part, except I was expecting to use clay to sculpt then scan that into cad to make a 3dp case. I got a bunch of keys and some “monster clay” bc it’s more solid than sculpy and jammed em in there to try and made a 3dayout like this but getting things in the right place in 3 dimensions with the clay as the base was hard and it ended up in the dead projects pile. Using the wire endoskeleton is such a great idea for holding the keys right where you need em.

Anyway I got a bunch of the khali(sp?) choc low profile keys for that. they are basically half the height of regular keys, I think they could be even better for this. One thing with a chord keyboard is that the keycaps that are big enough to reach across and find blindly might not need to be that big when you finger is just resting on them. I thought making some custom narrow caps might let you get more keys in a similar handheld form factor.

I might have to give this project another shot with what you’ve made here. awesome stuff!

This is fantastic, I've been looking for something like this for over a year so I can type while going for a walk on the treadmill.

The most mind blowing part of this is using modelling clay (I’m assuming the stuff that hardens to like foam texture).

great job showing this, inspiring!

I want this not for typing all the letters and numbers, but just the keyboard shortcuts to play Empire Earth V4 VR

- until that fantasy materializes maybe enough typing for an Age of Empires type game without being stuck at a full keyboard,

something like this maybe the perfect in-between ps4 controller and full keyboard for many things.

I mean, a nice thing about DIY-ing it, you can just program it with whatever keys you want:) You could even have a layer for whatever game and a layer for full typing.

This is super cool, Specially for VRs and Augmented Ray-bans. I still prefer a mechanical keyboard to type stuff.

- cost function for layouts?! awesome

- play doh

- IMU would be incredible

- less key version is good idea

Very nice work. Might not hurt to throw in a few more pictures that illustrate the steps in the build process.

I've been wanting something like this for a super long time!! Very cool.

How's typing on it?

That’s some true hacker device!

I really want something like this to pair with my iPad Pro when working in design tools (Affinity, Procreate, whatever). Apple Pencil in one hand, accessible keyboard shortcuts in the other.

My solution was to stick a tiny cheap macro keyboard on the back of the iPad... but I don't love the ergonomics.

Awesome work, well done.

Have you considered a twiddler? See https://www.mytwiddler.com/

Well I'll be damned, that actually looks kind of perfect. I thought I'd done my research too, but this never made it on my radar.

Can you vouch for whether it's any good for the use case I had in mind (Apple Pencil + [thing] + iPad)? It looks neat in any case, thanks for the tip.

I dont own one, but curate https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers where you may want to search for other tablet/iPad setups.

Theres been a couple Twiddler setups shared on there too.

I was experimenting with a Twiddler 3 for keyboard shortcuts on a Surface running Illustrator for a while. Started getting decent speed with my custom layout designed around my most used shortcuts. Ultimately I went back to a Mac laptop plus a drawing tablet, but this was because of issues with the Surface consistently dropping the first half a second of most of my stylus strokes, not because of the Twiddler.

A prefect prototype for developers who use AI for coding, ctrl c + v.

Bending fingers so much during use is bad for your tendons and ligaments.

true, a version where you could keep your hand flatter would be nice, though not as compact

You should look into thermoplastic like InstaMorph instead of clay.

Yeah that brings new definition to pebkac...

ohh so basically an ESP32 can be a keyboard… can _two_ ESP32s be two hands of a single keyboard?

Yep. That's how my keyboard halves work. There's a lot of varieties out there on the ergomechkeyboards subreddit and in other places.

love the design, it would be crazy if this becomes a thing!

Just don’t go introducing yourself as a one handed typist.

omg i luv u

awesome

Add this to the list of “18650 cells being incorrectly used as removable batteries”. At this point the sale of those battery holders should be banned…

Why is that a problem? Potential for damage when exposed/changed? No battery protection?

Potentially over discharging, which can reduce the life of the cells.

Can you elaborate on or cite a source as to why this practice is incorrect? The Nitecore D4 battery charger supports recharging of this and other sizes of Li-ion batteries (in addition to NiMH), so I am skeptical that it is inherently dangerous.

I guess an exposed battery is more susceptible to short circuit. Imagine you have this in your pocket while in a heavy rain. Battery could short circuit due to water creating conductive connection between battery terminals. It would heat up quickly an maybe even start burning. Still, I prefer 18650 to these flat, lasagna-type cells which swell and can be pierced by any sharp object. Even though the latter has built-in protection and the former doesn't.

I imagine that OP is referring to batteries with no protection circuit and the positive and negative terminals of the batteries being exposed[1]. The Samsungs in the keyboard do in fact lack a protection circuit. I don't know if banning the sale of battery holders is going to be a great fix.

[1]: Something like this: https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2021/CPSC-Issues...

Yes that is a good link summarizing the issue. If anything the perpetuation of the practice is making it harder for the actually-safe batteries. For example, TSA bans checking loose cordless drill li-ion batteries, despite them obviously having full PCB circuits inside with charging and short-circuit protection.

I've heard that there are tech savvy people using 14500 cells coupled with spacers to match voltage ranges as an upgrade from NiMHs. Made me realize there are still wonders in this world.

Not a new thing. Twiddler is on version 4. https://www.mytwiddler.com/

Op was showing off a project. Not claiming novelty. The fact that there are similar items on the market does not diminish this work.

I wasn't trying to diminish his work. I was letting others know that creating your own isn't the only option available.

Twiddler really isn’t the same product at all

But the twiddler is $230

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