Best Project or Innovation

[Muirium]

I freaking LOVE this board, and as someone who has done a whole bunch of fab and development I am in awe of this work too. I'm an old UNIX graybeard who remembers when half of these modifiers were still in common use on X11 terminals

The craftsmanship here is clear, as well as both the dedication and the research required to pull this off in a historical LISP way and you're right - anyone who sees this as just 'keycaps on a board' doesn't recognize the scale and scope here to pull this off.

This build is absolutely epic - no doubt.

The primary reason I'm voting for DMA is because it facilitates a whole new class of keyboard. I really, REALLY wish these two projects were in different awards as they are both very much deserving of community recognition.

Indeed!

Everyone just sees the large board and don't realise it actually functions like the LISP boards did, which is the major differentiation for me.

I’ll admit doing that myself: the very layout strikes me as the punchline to a joke about an obsessive compulsive keycaps group buy, rather than an actual keyboard. How are you going beyond the basic USB HID spec keyboard functions? There’s a lot of keys on a Hyper7 that just don’t map to ones you can send. Not unless you bypass the standard and write your own sofware on the host, I suppose.

Common Sense is a powerful gift to the community. A universal key for vintage capsense boards and newbuilds. That’s monumental! It’s not just one keyboard, or layout—no matter how huge—but anything anyone can imagine.

[__red__]

Freedom of keyboard layout design... hmm...

To give you an idea of how "unknown" this process was, when we started we understood the theory and application of how this all fitted together so badly we had general rules like this:

* There are magic dots, we don't know what they do.
* A track can only cross another track once and must cross all tracks.

Before CapSense it was through sheer force of will, repeated attempts (and cash) that the rules got hammered down enough that we could get ANY cap-board to work with xwhatsit at all.

Now - they pretty much work first time.

[jae-3soteric]

I freaking LOVE this board, and as someone who has done a whole bunch of fab and development I am in awe of this work too. I'm an old UNIX graybeard who remembers when half of these modifiers were still in common use on X11 terminals

The craftsmanship here is clear, as well as both the dedication and the research required to pull this off in a historical LISP way and you're right - anyone who sees this as just 'keycaps on a board' doesn't recognize the scale and scope here to pull this off.

This build is absolutely epic - no doubt.

The primary reason I'm voting for DMA is because it facilitates a whole new class of keyboard. I really, REALLY wish these two projects were in different awards as they are both very much deserving of community recognition.

Indeed!

Everyone just sees the large board and don't realise it actually functions like the LISP boards did, which is the major differentiation for me.

I’ll admit doing that myself: the very layout strikes me as the punchline to a joke about an obsessive compulsive keycaps group buy, rather than an actual keyboard. How are you going beyond the basic USB HID spec keyboard functions? There’s a lot of keys on a Hyper7 that just don’t map to ones you can send. Not unless you bypass the standard and write your own sofware on the host, I suppose.

Common Sense is a powerful gift to the community. A universal key for vintage capsense boards and newbuilds. That’s monumental! It’s not just one keyboard, or layout—no matter how huge—but anything anyone can imagine.

The board is fully QMK Compatible, and uses Unicode, QMK keycodes, custom macros and a number of layers and commands to replicate a lot of features. It also has a built in selection that allows you to change the output depending on OS so unicode and other functions work on the system you are on, simple macros for things like 'cut' and 'paste' and more complex ones that invoke the old sequential key functionality.

The layout was designed by 7bit himself I believe, hence the Gb for the H7 keycaps in R6. I just used those as the basis for the project, and with a team, built the board and all its code around that.