deskthority

My first topic on Deskthority. Greetings!

On my way back from work yesterday, I picked up a certain package from Germany at the local post office, ordered nearly a year ago. These long-awaited keycaps were the missing piece to the completion my custom keyboard project, so now I'm happy to share how it all finally turned out!
The board has a black TEX aluminum case, black aluminum plate and S60-X PCB from Sentraq. Hollow noise is caught by padding non-slip below the PCB, and stabilizer rattle caught by filling it full of Teflon grease. It has a Cherry MX linear grey switch for the space bar and blacks for the rest of the board. Hardware-wise, it presents itself to me as a solid, reliable keyboard.

Cadet is a keyboard controller for the ATmega32u4 written in Ivory, a Haskell EDSL for safe systems programming. Ivory was designed for implementing high-assurance software for UAVs, but why not put it in a keyboard? Space Cadet was a keyboard used on LISP machine, and in this incarnation, its keycaps go on a board with the controller written in Ivory. Hence my keyboard's name: Ivory Cadet. My academic interest is in software verification and provable correctness, so the logic symbols of the Space Cadet keycaps and the controller implementation language turned out to be a perfect match for me!

The switches were actually a gift from cookie, from when I was translating between Happy for running the HHKB metal sticker GB. Thanks cookie! The keycaps are unmistakably the Space Cadet set from 7bit's Round 6, with small cadet legends. Thanks to 7bit for accommodating my last minute order changes, and of course running the group buy! I couldn't have finished this board without Deskthority, so thank you all.

What next? Cadet still contains some C code, mostly from the Teensy USB stack. I plan to rewrite these into Ivory. Unicode input support for the logic symbols is a priority too. I'll make sure to update progress on this thread. I'd also like to see some more ducks on the board and maybe a hashbang, so I've put in orders for facetsesame's Honey Spherical Extras. Lastly, how do I go about bribing 7bit into running the Space Cadet set with front printed legends for Round 8?

Hi limeburst,

Congrats on getting this wonderful key cap set!
If you can collaborate with 7bit to make front printed legends (or with some doubleshot technique?) happen, please do!

Haata has a suggested USB IO protocol for doing things like injecting UTF-8-encoded characters, but as I understand it standard USB works in terms of scan codes not Unicode.

Depending on your OS you can try creating a keycap file or equivalent for converting keypresses to character data. Either way it would be a lot of work—but how cool it would be to have a keyboard with all those crazy logic symbols on it that actually worked as advertised!

vvp wrote: ↑I was thinking about trying Atom for a keyboard firmware

I too have had this thought, but I don't have the time to commit right now unfortunately. Looking forward to seeing your progress limeburst.

vvp wrote: ↑Well I do not like the keyboard(*) but I like very much your firmware approach. I was thinking about trying Atom for a keyboard firmware but at the end I chose the most easy way and only ported chrisandreae's firmware. It supports remaps and macros very well so it's good enough.

Thanks for the praise! I would have definitely considered Atom as well if I had known about it.

vvp wrote: ↑Do you use standard USB HID Keyboard/Keypad page (0x07) key codes and the generic USB HID keyboard drivers? If so then I guess that your keyboard will emit a macro (like e.g. <pressAlt><Num+>(<hexdigit>)+<releaseAlt>) to generate a unicode code point. Or on linux, one can use Compose key combinations (which is what I do) for all the crazy unicode characters.

Yes, this is what I'm aiming for in the near future

pdc wrote: ↑Haata has a suggested USB IO protocol for doing things like injecting UTF-8-encoded characters, but as I understand it standard USB works in terms of scan codes not Unicode.

I've met HaaTa a few times over IRC before, and it'd be amazing if I can work on something like that together

The name you gave your board is appropriate for another reason too: Ivory was the name of a Symbolics Lisp Machine processor from the late 1980s.

I wonder why I missed this topic so far. While everyone seems to be flattered by your keycaps, I'm more interested in the firmware. Would you mind sharing your Ivory code with us? Just starting out with Ivory, I think I could learn a thing or two from you.

hbar wrote: ↑I wonder why I missed this topic so far. While everyone seems to be flattered by your keycaps, I'm more interested in the firmware. Would you mind sharing your Ivory code with us? Just starting out with Ivory, I think I could learn a thing or two from you.

I thought he did in the OP?

https://github.com/limeburst/cadet

Good Lord, I must be blind. Sorry for that...