simulating chorded keyboards

[Paul Beaudet]

Have been building chorded keyers for a couple of years now, Going to be
brief because I could go off on a real tangent about DIY keyboards.
If he is really interested I'll likely have test pcb boards in the future
and other opportunities. Ultimately I have been gunning to build a wearable
computing platform around wearable typing design idea I've been stewing on
for a long time.

Most existing keyboards are poorly suited for chording, you'll probably
need to spend $80+ to get an keyboard without rollover/ghosting.

I have already written a lot of open source code for 5, 8, and 10 key
keyers for the leonardo and sparkcore that can be found on Github.
Need to update the project page with the 10 key keyer, but the following
has links to my github and some of the basic ideas involved.
https://hackaday.io/project/1386-Neotype%3A-Haptic-Interfacing. Goes a
little further than just chording. (-;
Will warn that its hard to get one of these up and running, never-mind
actually learning how to use one.
I'm more than willing to sit down with and help out anyone with a serious
interest in building typing devices to help people communicate more
efficiently.

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Matt Minuti <matt.minuti at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd strongly suggest looking at doing a little bit of hardware hacking via
> the Arduino Leonardo. It's trivially easy to make it show up as a generic
> USB HID keyboard, meaning no fancy driver concerns, no matter the OS.
>
> The keys could either be a handful (heh) of buttons laid out however he
> wants, or you could even use a PS/2 keyboard and have the Arduino interpret
> the keycodes and send the appropriate keypress signals via USB.
>
> A student of mine once made a Minecraft griefing controller: it basically
> had QWEASD, spacebar, shift, and a dedicated spamming button. The buttons
> worked as expected, sending keypresses, but the spam button sent the
> necessary keypresses to go into "talk" mode, write some nonsense like
> "HAHAHA n00b, you can't get me lol!!," and send it to everyone on the
> server. I'm sure the possibilites for good are even greater than such
> evil... :)
>
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 2:22 PM, David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> wrote:
>
>> Remember the MIDI son? This is a different son, Kyle, with a different
>> project. He's interested in chorded keyboards. You can find these here
>> and there online, but he wants to design his own. To start, he wants to
>> simulate one with a regular keyboard.
>>
>> We've been looking into ways to let him flexibly define keyboard input
>> (chords, modifier keys, etc) but without requiring a ton of low-level
>> programming.
>>
>> 1) A simple game engine (pygame, e.g.) that reports "key down" and "key
>> up" events rather than simply delivering a pressed key via something
>> like read(), getchar(), etc. He needs to get between these events to
>> figure out the "current chord". Even pygame is more programming than he
>> really wants to do, though.
>>
>> 2) xkeycaps looks like the opposite of what I want, but it's described
>> so poorly I can't tell for sure. It looks like I can generate multiple
>> keysyms from a single key press, but not vice versa.
>>
>> 3) emacs! This was actually my first suggestion, since it does almost
>> everything he wants. Of course, he'd have to learn emacs first. However,
>> there's another problem that I'm not sure can be overcome. Aren't emacs
>> sequences limited such that you can't have one be a prefix of another?
>>
>> For instance, he'd like to be able to do this:
>>
>>     'i' key down followed by 'i' key up: 'i'
>>     'i' down followed by 'k' down followed by 'i' and 'k' both up: 'm'
>>
>> but with emacs you can have "i+k" mapped to m but then not 'i' mapped to
>> 'i'.
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20141014/d2892c10/attachment.html