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Chordy KEY

Chording in space for easier control and input , an older idea for the new era.

servoServo
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Chording keyboards have been around for a while, but appear to not be taken seriously. Although you can see many data entry methods throughout science fiction but usually involve hundreds of buttons that require the user to look at them and appear to be hard to work in adverse conditions or with bulk such as gloves. The chording keyboard can take on many different shapes and easily used with one hand. The keys can be easily acquired without the use of pips and build with proper spacing to be used with gloves. The lower amount of keys used makes the manufacturing of the device cheaper and simpler This project is a completed left hand proof of concept chording keyboard that currently has all functionality of a standard keyboard minus function keys and plenty of combinations to add them and many macros. The base microcontroller is a ATmega32U4 packaged as a sparkfun pro micro, 8 buttons and 6 indicating leds the case is 3d printed and backed with craft foam.

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Big Boy Pete wrote 11/16/2014 at 16:40 • point
How did you come up with your encoding? -- Is it optimized for letter/symbol usage? (I've come up with a chording code that optimizes these -- but don't have non-commercial hardware to put it on)

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Paul_Beaudet wrote 11/17/2014 at 17:43 • point
How does your code optimize?

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Servo wrote 11/18/2014 at 03:18 • point
The initail chord to letter is based on the microwriter close to the cykey. For the code it is reading a port in paralell (not the best usualy for key boards) the five home keys are the lower 5 bits of a byte pinky being 2^4 and thumb 2^0. The key maps are char arrays of 32 with the key. Preses maped to chords based on hand binary counting. upon a press relase a switch is used to filter special presses befor sending a letter to the computer by maskig the upper three bits off the input byte then used for array position and look up.

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Allan MacGregor wrote 09/28/2014 at 15:51 • point
I would love to try writing in one of these.

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Paul_Beaudet wrote 09/26/2014 at 18:22 • point
Nice, If you need any help, reach out. I have been working on a similar objective with the same micro for a couple of years. Come to realize what I want to do is way outside of the atmega32u4's capability, but its still a great micro to prototype a project in this vain. Did some research on layouts that might be of interest.

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Ivoah wrote 08/05/2014 at 14:38 • point
I have always been facinated by chording keyboards!

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jlbrian7 wrote 07/25/2014 at 11:23 • point
I don't think I would ever sit at a computer again if I had to use one of those, but it is a neat idea.

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