deskthority

This has a lot of sense, anyways I'm somehow concerned about the impact on feel, I mean, it has sense for controlling a motor's speed, but while making this thing vary on weight you will have no weight and full weight intervals. It must be tried by sure anyways. It is not a problem. You must realiz...

This is the part I have not very clear, why would I want to PWM the switches? I was thinking on varying the input voltage so the current will do too and with it the strength of the magnets Only a very rough "on the back of a napkin" calculation. Feel free to improve it. Because PWM is more energy e...

Have you calculated exactly how much power would be used by an HHKB sized board? Still not, but the stronger the permanent magnets and the less the wire gauge, the more power efficiency of the switch. That is rather strange way of understanding how electricity works. Although the current required t...

Yeah, keycaps are not my strong skill
I put there whatever has the right shape with little regards whether it is properly labelled, ABS/PBT, shiny or not ...

Custom build K84CS, the best keyboard ever

I have a guess for the metal plate behind the slider magnet. It is there to linearize magnetic field change depending on press depth. The hall sensor output should be more linear with it.

Ach, "A_Person" is the same as "Me". I did not know. Only a kid according to Nevin.
Thanks for info Findecanor.

Well because it's just a potentiometer that adjusts volume and at max volume it has virtually no resistance, the only way to make it louder would be to find a new driver and likely new speaker. I personally think it's too much work and not worth it but can research some parts tomorrow if you think ...

two controllers - most expensive and most firmware work (if it is not already supported but it probably is already supported); only 4 wires one controller and one IO expander - probably the best option; only 4 wires one controller and two shift registers - the most easy and cheapest but needs 6 wir...

Contrary to the most deskthority users, I do not collect vintage keyboards. I own 4 keyboards and I should probably dump one or two of them as little useful. I'm into keyboards because I use them daily and I think that ergonomics of most keyboards sucks. I wanted to built something better than kines...

I heard that the best for preserving night vision is lower intensity green. The point was that eye is more sensitive to green and that allows lower light intensity. And the benefit of lower intensity is higher than benefit of red compared to green. Red better than green at the same intensity. Blue i...

He is probably the seller. It is just an advertisement. Though, it is relevant to this site.

Actually I quite enjoyed the post

I do not think Commander X16 makes sense though. MCUs are cheaper and better for a new stuff. Emulators are cheaper and better for the old Commodore stuff.

But the Commander X16 project is cute and funny. Not really useful though.

Since you do not have proper thumb clusters then +1 for a split space bar. Even if you use it in gaming sessions then you probably do not use full width of it with one hand. If so then you can split it at the locations where it is not typically pressed. Split space bar allows you to map one half of ...

I do not use any clipboard monitoring app now and I do not care about it personally. I had something in a far past on windows. It implemented something like clipboard with history and a preview.

Well, there are application which monitor clipboard and those will mind. Also I'm not sure whether all controls accepting keyboard input will accept also clipboard. But point taken. It is not that bad. You possibly can hack around the standard key processing reasonably well with clipboard as you can...

@cheater: add 43) When cheating with SendInput API: It probably will not work as users are used to with typical keyboards. E.g. pressing "shift" on one keyboard and key "a" on another will not produce capital A. But you can still work around it by also monitoring standard keyboard stream and adjusti...

If you want unicode input directly in the keyboard then you need significant support of operating system vendors. The problem is that the input data flow works like this currently: keyboard firmware scans input matrix and sends resulting scan codes to PC a keyboard driver in PC handles keyboard inte...

Response to your first post. add 1) This firmware already supports some very simple grograms running in the keyboard. Although you propose much more powerful version, you should also realize security implications of it. If you allow easy reprogramming of the keyboard from the host then you could not...

Well it is easy to bolt two halves of a split keyboard to a piece of plywood or something ... Though after using a split board for a few years I do not want to go back. Well, maybe if I would want to use it in my lap then it would be a good idea to have it in one piece. But when it is used on a tabl...

35% peroxide can be bought in Slovakia in shops selling paint, thinners etc
So there are at least two EU countries where it can be bought easily.

@Rayndalf: Nice prototype anyway.

Use temperature safely below the glass transition temperature of the specific plastic used. E.g. for ABS the glass transition is around 80 °C. So use temperature of about 60 °C (or less). I do not know what temperature I used for my ABS keycaps. It was fairly hot. I could not keep my hand in it but ...

@Rayndalf: A contoured DIY keyboard! Nice! Post some pictures of the overall shape when you are ready.

Ok, if you insist to do also the electrical part then here is the most easy way how to do it. Find an open source project which publishes both firmware (e.g. a C source code) and electrical design (e.g. complete kicad project files). Do not focus on controller (i.e. teensy 2.0) first. Use the same c...

If you are dealing with design part only then do not bother yourself with internals like PCBs, controllers and how it might look inside the case. Make the part you are responsible for: the outside design/look of the keyboard. Let the rest to the students which study electronics. If you are supposed ...

@Rayndalf:
There seem to be small differences all over the Advantage models. Interesting that my model KB510USB (label name Advantage MPC/USB as well) is different from yours KB500USB. Well it is probably only the way how the key wells are connected. Controller HW looks the same.

If you already have a PCB designed then using it is easier.
Otherwise it is easier to hand wire. It took me 1.7 hour to hand wire keyboard switches on this:
viewtopic.php?p=347675#p347675
That is half of a keyboard. And it was 3.45 hours the for whole keyboard.

Did keywell schematic change between different Kinesis models?
I thought the it did not change.
I have model KB510USB.
Edit: It has ABS pad printed keycaps.

It is too late for you but there is some information about kinesis key matrix here: http://humblehacker.com/blog/20100720/hacking-the-kinesis-contoured-keyboard/ If I get to modernising my kinesis I'll go with Chris' firmware almost for sure and (less likely) with his hardware as well. That is mostl...