deskthority

For what it's worth I'm now shopping around a much simpler design; A flat 1 inch by 5/8 inch mild steel bar 10 inches long with an 9.5" deep slot across it. That slot is 1/7 inch wide, to admit a 1/8 inch workpiece. At the tip of the split end, there is a 14mm hole that goes through the split bar. T...

A tool like that can be made with an 8" throat.

But I think I'm backing off from the guy I've been talking to. Depending on what the next guy says that may not be the type of tool we wind up with at all.

The more I communicate with this particular machinist the less I'm confident in him, sorry to say. I'm going to start shopping it around to other shops for bids.

These are mechanically the *kind* of punch he's talking about; these are commercial offerings with a lot of polish and refinement though, not a small-order machine-shop thing. To be clear, this is *NOT* one that he built and the thing we're talking about would lack some of these details. I'm not pro...

I proposed a hammer punch with a guide/plate support, but he says 1/8 inch metal (he speaks SAE not metric) is too thin for a hammer punch to NOT distort the plate. It would seem fine for the first few holes, but then when you went to mount it you'd find that it's no longer flat. But it isn't so thi...

I don't have one yet, so no pix of punched plates. Still trying to figure out whether I can order ten. The machinist says this is a routine job and assures me that I can get flat clean holes with it. Evidently this is a variant of something called a 'case punch' which is what they use to make cutout...

I am talking with a machinist about creating a punch that makes square holes exactly 14x14mm in a plate of 1/8" mild steel. I think you guys can probably figure out why, but I'll mention anyway that that's the size of the cutout for a cherry MX keyswitch. If it turns out that a lot of people want th...

Honestly I would not be messing about with keymatrix connections or PWM controls for backlighting. I would just put the backlighting LEDs on their own circuit, with a pot to adjust brightness. The only LEDs the keyboard controller needs to know about are numlock/caplock/scrolllock/kana/compose, or w...

Oh. Hand sizes. Yeah, that's an issue. My hands are huge. When I put my hand down flat on a surface, the distance from heel to fingertip is about 26 cm. The main reason I started building keyboards was so I could place keys 21 mm apart instead of 19.5. It's only a little bit, but it makes a HUGE dif...

Was the switch from spherical to cylindrical key caps really a cost-cutting measure? Nope. They're injection molded; costs at volume for injection molding are exactly the same. Spherical is better for fingertip tactile feedback, but it's not a major issue. I think as someone else said it was about ...

There are no linear switches I like. Nothing wrong with them for gaming I suppose, but I use keyboards to type. So those Cherry reds and browns, I don't care about so much. Give me the stiff and clicky ones. I prefer Cherry greens, but keyboards populated with Greens are rare; I usually settle for B...

PCB is damaged so I'd avoid it.

You are correct. Good eye. I personally don't give a rip about the PCBs though; No control of layout, and wiring myself seems like it's more reliable than attempting to reuse an existing board anyway.

Tedious though.

The 6kRO vs NkRO issue is not a limitation of the Apple OS. Keyboards have to come up in a "Boot Mode" (where the BIOS knows how to run them) before the OS loads. In Boot Mode they transmit packets limited to 8 bytes. They use one byte for modifier bits, one byte is reserved, and that leaves 6 bytes...

If someone wants an alps-compatible plate + case and PCB for $7, they should look here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MAC-APPLE-IIgs-AEKII-EXTENDED-KEYBOARD-CASING-M3501-ALPS-7-00-S-H-/322117654308?hash=item4affb55724:g:qMAAAOSw1h5XQb7H I am not affiliated with this auction in any way, I just noticed it a...

Actually it would be more this size: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71S-dPrKQoL._SL1500_.jpg That big ol' square in the middle? That's a slot for an SD card, which is, yes, about the size of your thumbnail and even some pretty ordinary ones hold 8Gbytes. It's shown with an adapter ...

I have found about a dozen hall effect buttons. They have an awesome tactile effect because they work by bumping a magnet back and forth between the hall sensor and a ferrous plate. You get the tactile bump when the magnet disengages the plate and 'snaps' over to the (bakelite?) surface that separat...

If you want the proper usage/exploit of the USB standard itself, which is what I was originally thinking of, here it is. It would be proper, according to the USB HID specification, to define a (non-boot) report protocol including a field from usage page 16 (unicode codepoint) enabling the keyboard t...

Yep. I know you share my opinion on space-savers. But you can't deny that it's an unpopular opinion.

I have three ANSI enter keys with wire stabilizers. They are 2.25u keys from old apple keyboards with keystems that fit Alps switches.

how is it to type on the columnar stagger? Is it much nicer? How long does it take getting used to? And do you miss the spacebar? Well, more to the point, do you actually physically miss the space key on your board? I've been considering keyboard layouts, but I'm sort of conservative about layout, a...

I have no personal experience, but other people say that a matrix keyboard only works if the hands are separated OR if there is enough space between the hands. Like the ergo boards that put the arrow pad (all the keys usually between numpad and typing area) inbetween left and right hand typing area...

I realize this question is likely to attract a bunch of partisans but I guess I want to ask. I've seen a bunch of people building ortholinear (grid-style) keyboards instead of the conventional offset where the columns are slanted slightly diagonally. I have never used such a keyboard, and don't real...

Ah. A LaTeX user. Nothing wrong with it but I prefer plain text.

Darn right they do. If it wasn't for macro pads I'd be SO screwed when I write a paper.

Weird. I have what looks like exactly the same keyboard (with Orange Alps switches) and I pulled the space bar to take a measurement. But mine only has the stab socket on the left side. On the right, no stab socket and not even a hole in the plate for it to mount in. The right side of the spacebar h...

Oh yeah, I'm SURE people would need a macro pad with something like this. A really good one. For example if someone is writing a math paper where they're using Greek characters for variables, and combining double-overbars to mean it denotes a vector or something and some other weird composed charact...

I'm willing to treat unicode as having the vast majority of its useful bits fixed. The "evolving standard" is mostly filling in corners at this point. The controller side programming is needed because it's not just a matter of emitting unicode codepoints. They have to be emitted in a way that makes ...

Definition of macros - fixed, static, canned. Not what's happening. But I don't really care what you call it, so go ahead.

Uh, no, not "plain old macros." Putting real logic in the controller to do arbitrary character composition makes it generative - not individual macros tied to specific key combinations but something that can be built/determined under program control before it's sent. It's not some obscure bug or met...

It is true that the USB standard does not allow keyboards to do this by the usual means. But every major operating system keyboard driver now uses the same means to enter extended Unicode characters (or at least can enable it), and the keyboard I propose can leverage that. Once it's decided what cha...