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Comments (39)

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  NotARoomba
  A while back I was frustrated when wanting to buy a keyboard that there were no triangle-shaped keyboards or circle-shaped keyboards. This lack of peculiar keyboard shapes gave me the idea to make a keyboard that could be reconfigurable into any shape my heart desired. I’m still working on the firmware and making more keys but I wanted to share my progress so far. Heres the source if anyone’s interested in how I made it: https://github.com/notaroomba/keybytes
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  Agentlien
  I like the idea but I could only find an image of two keys. It would be great to see a demo of a full layout. With only two keys it's a very early POC and hardly a keyboard.Does communication work well and feel snappy with a full set of keys? How is the structural integrity of a full one? Can it be easily moved around? That type of questions could easily make this unusable at scale.
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  mrheosuper
  The I2C has limit of 127 of different addresses. Also there can be I2C hang, especially when there is that many slaves on the bus.Maybe using CAN is better.
• rebooot
  good idea! the other day was doing a roundup on keyboards to see whats new and got a striking realization, how nobody has ever slapped a nvme slot into on the back/core part of the enclosure to use as external drive since lot of us comute everyday with extra peripherals
• 9dev
  I'd suggest also adding blank modules without a switch on them for empty space on the keyboard (for example around arrow keys), that would still provide the interconnect to adjacent keys. Cool project.
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  vim-guru
  I like the idea, but ergonomic keyboards are usually not perfectly columnar.
• O_H_E
  I'm not sure if I have a use case for this but on the technical aspects this is so cool. Those magnetic snaps made me grin!
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  kaipereira
  This is awesome!How does the rigidity of the keyboard hold up with many keys and what's the cost of the materials at higher order quantity?
• wcchoi
  Something similar: https://youtu.be/_u8gV643214The keys are attached to a board so it can be in any orientation
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  kvakvs
  Sometimes my keyboards get dropped and lose a keycap or two, but never anything serious. If this is dropped on the floor, my trusty keyboard will turn into a bag of puzzle bits, right in the middle of heated gameplay or a meeting...
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  IllIIlIlIlIIIIl
  This is a really neat idea for a macro keyboard. If it supported staggered rows and row heights, not to mention structural rigidity it would be good for everyday use too.
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  eviks
  Is there a mouse module? Can you connect in a "staggered" manner rather than in a linear grid?
• jasonjmcghee
  This is very cool.It needs spacers / extensions so it can be laid out as desired.
• stavros
  This is cool, but wouldn't it cost more than $2k for a 104-key keyboard? I can't imagine these PCBs having a final price of less than $20 each.
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  SV_BubbleTime
  I looked over the PCB and schematic and it looks well polished. Not a first draft obviously.I sort of don’t get the 4x I2C busses. I’m probably missing something obvious but it isn’t immediately apparent how the units all have addressing worked out.
• trollbridge
  I’ve wondered when someone would do this (which gets rid of the annoyances of scanning).The real breakthrough would be reprogrammable key legends in something like e-ink.
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  pparanoidd
  Now give them all wheels so they can rearrange themselves on my desk
• aghuang
  Very cool, would really like one
• fitsumbelay
  this is extremely cool. would love to see full board
• hexjy
  [flagged]
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  M95D
  Non-viable product. I would NOT buy this.- How much does it cost? Sell price, not BoM price. I expect something like $10'000 for a full 104-key layout.- How heavy would it be?- Can you lift a 104-key layout from the table without it breaking in 2 (or more) pieces? Can you even lift or move a 40% layout with one hand?- How do you arrange it in a non-ortholinear layout? If you can't, then anyone can just buy an ordinary ortholinear for $100 and switch layouts in software.- How does the spacebar key look like? Enter key? Shift? I can't type if those big keys aren't big.- How do you make spaces between key groups?- There are a lot of pogo pin connections. It's statistically impossible for all of them to work. Is there any redundancy for those connections? Alternate signal paths with automatic rerouting? Any debugging tools/indicators to find where the bad connections are?- If you have a MCU in every key, and at that price, I would expect them to have a mini-display in the keycap plus lots of other fancy features.- How about automatic function assignment for each key based on it's location? Can it do that? If not, then any drop on the floor becomes a half-hour puzzle-solving problem.