The most striking feature of the Tenshi keyboard has to be those dual track pads. But then you notice that [fata1err0r81] managed to sneak in two extra thumb keys on the left, and that those are tilted for comfort and ease of actuation.

The name Tenshi means ‘angel’ in Japanese, and creator [fata1err0r81] says that the track pads are the halos. Each one slides on a cool 3D-printed track that’s shaped like a half dovetail joint, which you can see it closer in this picture.

Tenshi uses a pair of RP2040 Zeros as controllers and runs QMK firmware. The track pads are 40 mm each and come from Cirque. While the Cirques have been integrated into QMK, the pull request for ZMK has yet to be merged in. And about those angled keys — [fata1err0r81] says they tried risers, but the tilting feels like less effort. Makes total sense to me, but then again I’m used to a whole keyboard full of tilted keys.

kbplacer Is Your New Best Friend

What’s the worst part about building custom mechanical keyboards? Well, it probably depends on the person, but for many, the answer would be placing the elements and routing them in order to create the actual PCB.

[Adam] wrote kbplacer, which is an open-source KiCad plugin for designing mechanical keyboards. kbplacer does automatic key placing and routing, and works with Keyboard Layout Editor, VIA, QMK, and, experimentally, Ergogen. It also places diodes, and lets the user select the diode position in relation to key position. In addition, kbplacer can also be installed with pip as a Python package for use with other tools.

If you do want to use it with Ergogen, [Adam] outlines a workflow example. Also, check out how kbplacer works with a whole bunch of popular layouts.

The Centerfold: Battleship Harleyquin

Harlequin all the things, I say, and bring back the four-color Volkswagen. That’s why I love this here Battleship Harleyquin. Don’t miss the gallery!

This may look like an Alice, but it’s really the AVA by Sneak Box with GMK Panels key caps. A matching Panels desk mat might have been too much; I think the GMK Slasher looks nice.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Smith Premier 1

While not quite a 200% keyboard, the Smith Premier 1 definitely has one in spirit. As you can probably tell, there are separate keys for upper and lower case letters. No key performs a second function, so there is no Shift in sight. I particularly like the double space bars and the fact that the numerals run down both sides.

This machine, produced by the L.C. Smith Gun Co. of Syracuse, New York beginning in the late 1880s was “the most advertised and successful double keyboard typewriter of its time”. It sold for $100, which was about average for a keyboard typewriter at that time, when one could buy a horse-drawn carriage for $60.

While modern typewriters make use of keys attached to type bars with levers, the Smith Premier uses an array of turning rods in order to transfer motion from the key press to the type bar.

Pressing a key turns a particular horizontal rod that runs the length of the machine. At the rear, a small lever connected to the rod pulls down on the type bar above it, striking the paper. Apparently this design was quite smooth and responsive for the typist. Be sure to check out the detailed images on this one.

ICYMI: the Portable Pi 84

Over the years, the idea of ‘portable’ has changed significantly. While we once had luggable computers and chonky laptops, these have given way to sleek machines that look pretty much all alike from the outside.

Some of those laptops of yore had ultra-wide displays and were hinged in the center, leaving a sort of trunk the back. It is these classic computers that inspired [Michael Mayer] to build the Portable Pi 84.

Well, those, and in particular, [Michael]’s chosen mechanical keyboard, itself based on the Happy-Keyboard from [Luis Alegría]. The 9.3″ Waveshare display serendipitously just fits over the keyboard, and the rest is in that spacious trunk — the Raspberry Pi 4, a UPS hat, a couple of 21700 batteries, and a pair of speakers.

Be sure to check out the printed panels that let the user change up the ports and connection layout, because that’s an incredibly cool idea.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

With US astronauts scheduled to return to the Moon in 2026, it might be nice for them to really and truly know ahead of time what the gravity situation is going to be like. At 1/6th Earth’s gravity, the difference can be difficult to simulate.

But not anymore. French acrobatic artist [Bastien Dausse] has created a contraption that does exactly that. [Dausse] straps himself in, and is instantly able to slowly sproing about, up and down and all around in semi-slow motion, using this device which is calibrated to the Moon’s gravity. [Dausse]’s troupe’s performances center on the idea of gravity and of subverting it.

In order to achieve this effect, the swooping sculpture uses a pair of large counterweights. Check out the video below to see how they too become part of the action during a captivating duet performance. Although not attached, part of the device is a disk on which it smoothly moves around. It looks really fun, and more than a little bit dangerous. But mostly fun.

Did you know that Da Vinci created several experiments dedicated to determining the properties of gravity?

There’s no reason why a visually impaired person can’t enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It just needs to look a little different. Or, in this case, feel different.

16-year-old [feazellecw] has come up with just the solution — a puzzle with pieces that have both a defining texture and a slant in the z-height to them. While there is no picture on the puzzle face to speak of, instead there is a satisfying end result. You could change it up and add a relief image if you wanted, as long as you still observed the diagonal lines, the z-slant, and the little hole in the bottom that helps differentiate it from the top.

As [feazellecw] says, it’s important to find a box to help keep the pieces together during assembly; a 3D-printed box would be a nice touch. Files for this 15-piece puzzle are available if you’d like to make one for yourself or someone else, but just the idea might inspire you to make your own variant.

Don’t like putting puzzles together? Build a robot to do it for you.

The process of creating a diamond naturally takes between 1 and 3.3 billion years. Conversely, a lab-grown diamond can now be created in 150 minutes. But despite being an ethical and environmentally-friendly alternative to the real thing, the value of lab-grown diamonds has plummeted in recent years. Manufacturers are doing various things to battle the stigma and increase their value by being carbon neutral and using recycled metals.

About halfway through is where this article gets really interesting. Swiss jeweler LOEV has partnered with lab growers Ammil to produce a line of Swiss-made jewelry by relying on renewable energy sources. 90% comes from hydroelectric power, and the rest comes from solar and biomass generation. Now, on to the process itself.

Growing a diamond starts with a seed — a thin wafer of diamond laser-shaved off of an existing stone, and this is placed in a vacuum chamber and subjected to hydrocarbon gas, high heat (900 to 1200 °C), and pressure.

Then, a microwave beam induces carbon to condense and form a plasma cloud, which crystallizes and forms diamonds. The result is called a ‘cake’ — a couple of diamond blocks. The excess carbon is lasered away, then the cake is processed and polished. This is known as the chemical vapor deposition method (CVD).

There is another method of growing diamonds in a lab, and that’s known as the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) method. Here, a small bit of natural diamond is used to seed a chamber filled with carbon, which is then subjected to high pressure and temperatures. The carbon crystallizes around the seed and grows around a millimeter each day.

As the industry evolves, lab-grown diamonds present a sustainable alternative to natural diamonds. But the consumer is always in charge.

Once you’ve got a stone, what then? Just use 3D printing to help create the ring and setting.

What do you do when your laptop keyboard breaks for the second time? Well, most people might use an external keyboard until they couldn’t take it anymore and bought a new machine. But [Marcin Plaza] isn’t most people.

It took more than twelve hours of CAD, but [Marcin] redesigned the case to be at least twice as thick as the Lenovo Yoga that inspired this project in order to accommodate a slimmed-down mechanical keyboard. Further weight-loss surgery was required in order to make the keyboard fit, but the end result is kind of a marvel of engineering. It’s marriage of sleek modernity and early laptop chonky-ness, and we love it.

Lacking a complete metal fab shop of one’s own, [Marcin] elected to have a board house fab it out of titanium and was quite surprised by the result. We really like the clear acrylic bottom, into which [Marcin] drilled many holes for airflow. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

Did you initially wonder whether the new case was printed? That’s totally a thing, too.

Thanks to [Katie] for the tip!

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this great little music-controlling macro pad by [nibbler] actually was. Why? Because as Hackaday’s own [Donald Papp] reminded us, we all need a win sometimes, especially as projects drag on and on without any end in sight.

As [nibbler] points out, what really constitutes a win? Set the bar too low and it won’t feel like one at all. Too high, and you may become too discouraged to cross the finish line. With that in mind, [nibbler] set the bar differently, limiting themselves to what could be done in the one day per week they have to devote time to electronic matters.

One-day turnaround usually means using parts on hand and limiting oneself to already-learned skills and techniques. No problem for [nibbler], who, armed with an Arduino Leonardo Tiny and a some colorful push buttons, set about designing a suitable enclosure, and then putting it all together. Was this a win? [nibbler] says yes, and so do I.

Keycaps To Dye For

When I saw [Nosp1]’s reddit post about dyeing their Moonlander keycaps, I remembered I was going to do that myself one of these days. While I was planning to use good ol’ Rit dye, [Nosp1] pointed to a video they watched that uses something called iDye Poly. Irritating name aside, this stuff looks like it does a fine job of dyeing keycaps evenly and vibrantly.

It’s important that you realize there is both iDye and iDye Poly out there, and the latter is what you want. The difference is mainly in the extra lump of stuff which is dubbed the color intensifier. You will also want a PBT keycaps for sure, not ABS, and a big strainer if you want to dye them more like Easter eggs.

Once you’ve gathered a pot to dye them in and some water, just turn up the heat to a simmer and stir in the iDye gunk until it dissolves. Throw in the keycaps, wait 10-15 minutes, and then rinse them off and let them dry and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. The chap in the video below only did a handful of caps, which looks pretty snazzy.

The Centerfold: Six Sides of Miss Fifi

Despite all the angles presented here (and more here), we don’t know a lot about [pascuajur]’s keyboard, but that’s okay. We do know that it’s a Fifi, which is open source, or you can buy one already made. It’s nice to imagine that those switches are whatever color you want, isn’t it?

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers:  The Helios Typewriter

Some people like their keyboards small, like really small. So small that they end up with more layers than a fancy restaurant dessert. Apparently this has pretty much always been the case, as evidenced by the Helios typewriter introduced in 1908.

With just two rows of ten keys each, Justin Wilhelm Bamberger & Co.’s machine could output 80 characters total, thanks to a four-tier, cast-aluminium typewheel and three shift keys located to the left of the keyboard. You can get a closer look here, on a late model of the typewriter.

Operation looked like this: whenever a key was pressed, the typewheel would spin and move forward to strike the paper. Not a whole lot seems to be known about these little machines. By 1909, production had been taken over by the Kanzler typewriter factory in Berlin. Both companies eventually dissolved, and by 1915, the rights were acquired by A. Ney & Co. who renamed it the Helios-Klimax.

Via reddit

ICYMI: ErgO, Computer Interactions Can Be Comfortable

Okay, so this is not a keyboard. But it’s definitely an input of interest. ErgO is a smart ring that acts as an HID to extend your keyboard and mouse with something much, much cooler. No longer will you be tied to the home row. Imagine sitting or standing in any position you want, controlling your computer with ease.

ErgO is built out of breakout boards, so it’s simple to recreate. It has a lot of features that you don’t get with standard equipment, like ultra portability and device-switching capability.

At the heart of this ring is the Seeed Xiao nRF52840, which of course controls Bluetooth communication with your computer. Add to that a clickable Pimoroni trackball and some capacitive touch sensors, and you have a really capable smart ring that should be fairly easy to build or remix thanks to [Sophia]’s detailed instructions.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

When we talk about keyboards that do it all, we usually mean either big ones with lots of keys and doodads like rotary encoders and displays, or small ones with lots of layers (and usually a few doodads, too). But this — this is something else entirely. Chinese PC maker Linglong have crammed an entire mini PC into a keyboard that’s small enough to fit in your back pocket. Oh, and it folds, too. All you need is a display.

Why do you need a display? Why not include one, if you’re going to wedge everything else in there? Well, the company envisions its users pairing it with a VR or AR glasses. But we can see use cases far beyond ownership of special spectacles, of course.

For instance, office work. Linglong says this key-puter (you read it here first) will last up to ten hours for light use, and nearly six hours for watching movies, but heavy use will have you down to four hours, which really isn’t that bad.

Spec-wise, it looks pretty good, with an AMD Ryzen 7 and either 16 or 32 GB of memory and a half- or full-terabyte hard drive. The whole thing is around 4 x 6″ (15 x 10cm), presumably in the folded orientation, and weighs less than two pounds (800 g). The projected cost is $400-500 depending on specs.

Unfortunately, this little key-puter isn’t available just yet. There are just 200 units available for Beta testing, and no, we don’t have one!

Main and thumbnail images via Linglong

Usually the business card itself is the reminder to get in contact with whoever gave it to you. But this is Hackaday, after all. This solar-powered card reminds the recipient to send [Dead Rat Productions] an email by beeping about every two hours, although the gist of that email may simply be begging them to make it stop, provided they didn’t just toss the thing in the garbage.

The full-on, working version of the card is not intended for everyone — mostly serious-looking A-list types that ooze wealth. Most of [Dead Rat Productions]’ pub mates will get an unpopulated version, which could be a fun afternoon for the right kind of recipient, of course.

That person would need a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, a solar panel, plus some other components, like an energy-harvesting chip to keep the battery topped up. Of note, there is a coin cell holder that requires prying with a screwdriver to get the battery out, so there’s really no escaping the beeping without some work on their part. We rather like the artwork on this one, especially the fact that the coin cell sits inside the rat’s stomach. That’s a nice touch.

If you want someone to keep your business card around, you should probably make it really cool-looking, or have it do something useful. It’s kind of the whole point of the 2024 Business Card Challenge. And while we’d normally expect electronics of some persuasion to be involved, we must admit that this magnetic fidget card definitely does something, at least when manipulated. And even when it’s just sitting there, the card has a storage slot for IDs, or whatever you want.

Have you ever played with a magnetic fidget? They are quite satisfying, and making one yourself is likely to be even cheaper than making one of the spinning variety. This one uses a whopping 16 neodymium magnets, which means that it’s probably quite aurally satisfying as well as fun to handle.

And of course, since it’s 3D-printed, you can put whatever you want on the faces and update them easily if something changes. Bonus points to [Bhuvan Bagwe] for designing some for the Hackaday crew!

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt remember that for a brief time, some alkaline batteries came with a built-in battery tester. Basically, you just pushed really hard with your fingernails on the two ends of the strip, and it either lit up the little strip (or didn’t if it was dead), or made the word ‘good’ appear if energized.

But those days are long gone. What you need now is to either grab the voltmeter, stick out your tongue, or build yourself a battery-testing business card. Even the normies will enjoy this one, mostly because LEDs. Forty-seven of them to be exact, which will come to life and demonstrate that [Greg] is capable of making working electronic gadgets. No way does this card end up at the bottom of a desk drawer.

As far as grasping the batteries goes, [Greg] had several ideas, but ultimately landed on pogo pins, which we think is a fabulous solution. Be sure to check out the neat interactive BOM, somewhere in the middle of which is the CH32v003 RISC-V microcontroller. In the video after the break, you can see [Greg] using a Flipper Zero to program it.

Making stamps out of potatoes that have been cut in half is always a fun activity with the kids. But if you’ve got a 3D printer, you could really step up your printing game by building a mini relief printing press.

To create the gear bed/rack, [Kevr102] used a Fusion 360 add-in called GF Gear Generator. At first this was the most finicky part of the process, but then it was time to design the roller gears. However, [Kevr102] got through it with some clever thinking and a little bit of good, old-fashioned eyeballing.

Per [Kevr102], this press is aimed at the younger generation of printers in that the roller mechanism is spring-loaded to avoid pinched fingers. [Kevr102] 3D-printed some of the printing tablets, which is a cool idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that well for some styles of text, but most things came out looking great. You could always use a regular linocut linoleum tile, too.

This isn’t the first 3D-printed printing press to grace these pages. Here’s one that works like a giant rubber stamp.

[MakerM0]’s LangCard is an entry into our 2024 Business Card Challenge that just so happens to fit the Keebin’ bill as well.

You might label this a pocket cyberdeck, and that’s just fine with me. The idea here is to have a full-keyboard development board for learning programming languages like CircuitPython, MicroPython, C++, and so on, wherever [MakerM0] happens to be at a given moment.

Open up the LangCard and you’ll find an RP2040 and a slim LiPo battery. I’m not sure what display that is, but there are probably a few that would work just fine were you to make one of these fun learning devices for yourself.

Calling All Tiny Keyboard Makers!

It seems that [sporewoh], who has been featured here before for building magnificent tiny keyboards, is holding a tiny keyboard design contest, which is being sponsored by PCBWay.

All the rules and such are available over on GitHub. Basically, you need to create a new design, publish the open-source design somewhere along with the source files, and, ideally, build a functional prototype. Entries are made official by sharing in the appropriate channel of [sporewoh]’s Discord.

Entries will be scored on novelty and innovation, size/portability, viability, reproducibility, and presentation. Submissions aren’t due until September 10th, so you have a bit of time to really think about what you’re going to do. The prizes include PCBWay credits as well as kits designed by [sporewoh]. How small can you go and still be able to type at least 20 WPM? That’s a requirement, by the way.

The Centerfold: It’s a Tasty Snacks Board

That’s right; we’ve got a gallery this time. I simply couldn’t decide which picture best conveyed the deliciousness of this thing. I mean, the first shot is a good thought, but you really don’t get right away that it’s a Ring Pop knob, and that’s vitally important information.

Anyway, this is a Le Chiffre that has been quite smoothly 3D-printed in marble filament. [CattiDaddi] says they got that by using a matte print bed. I wish I knew what keycaps those are, because that is a sneaky typeface they have going.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

Here is quite an interesting bit of history as it relates to China’s ability to survive the ravages of time, which pivots on their use of character-based script.

The story begins with a talk that took place decades ago, and follows the path of one audience member who came to change the course of Chinese keyboard history — a Taiwanese cadet named Chan-hui Yeh.

After graduating with a B.S. in electrical engineering, Yeh went on to earn an M.S. in nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He then joined IBM, although it wasn’t to revolutionize Chinese text technologies; he was helping to develop computational simulations for large-scale manufacturing plants. But the talk stuck with him.

Yeh eventually quit his job and developed the IPX keyboard, which had 160 main keys with 15 characters each. A daughter keyboard was used to choose the character on a given key, and there were nearly 120 levels of “Shift” to change all the 160 keys’ character assignments.

See that picture with the spiral-bound book? The 160 keys are underneath the book, and the user presses the pages to access the pressure pads beneath. The booklets had up to eight pages, each with 2,400 characters. The total number of potential symbols was just under 20,000.

The IPX keyboard is just the first of three interesting inputs described within this history. You owe it to yourself to devote time to reading this one.

Thanks to [juju] for sending this in!

ICYMI: One-Handed Keyboard Does It Without Chording

Usually when we talk about operating an entire keyboard with one hand and leaving the other free for mousing or holding a beer, chording — pressing multiple keys at once like on a piano — is very much on the table. Keyboards like the Infogrip BAT come to mind.

But that isn’t always the case. Take for example the one-handed PCD Maltron, which I think must have inspired [Dylan Turner]’s one-handed keyboard.

[Dylan]’s design puts 75 keys in close reach of one hand’s worth of fingers, and doesn’t let the thumb off easy like on a standard keyboard. All the Function keys are  there, and the arrow keys are in a familiar layout. There is even an Insert/Delete cluster. Everything is up on GitHub if you want to make your own.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

So what if we’re halfway through 2024? People who needed to fidget all along still need something to do with their hands. So why not hand them a solution with your information on it?

Not only will this spin nicely, the spinning action will use magnets to energize PCB coils and light up LEDs for some persistence of vision action. Designing the PCB was easier than you might imagine thanks to KiMotor, a KiCad plugin to automate the design of parametric PCB motors.

Mechanical testing went pretty well with the bearings and magnets that [mulcmu] had on hand, along with a scrap PCB as the sacrifice. Although a bit difficult to hold, it spins okay with just the bearing and the shaft. Once the boards arrived, it was time to test the electrical side. So far, things are not looking good — [mulcmu] is only getting a few tens of mV out of the rectifier — but they aren’t giving up hope yet. We can’t wait to see this one in action!

Hurry! This is the last weekend to enter the 2024 Business Card Challenge! Technically you have until Tuesday, July 2nd, but you know what we mean. Show us what you’ve got!