really small keyboards

[elithebearded]

I'm sure it's partially just me not being very tuned into the keyboard scene, but it's also partly lack of general interest, but I'd like to find really small keyboards. Not keyboards with very few keys, but keyboards with very small keys.

I have a "BBQ20" keyboard from Solder Party (on Tindie). It's one of the smaller USB keyboards ever, I'm sure. 75mm wide, 55mm deep, 15mm tall. (Roughly 3" x 2.25" x 0.5"). It's based on a Blackberry phone part repurposed as USB-C.

Connected to a phone by a very short USB cable

deskthority.jpg (244.63 KiB) Viewed 2017 times

BBQ20 by arturo182

bbq20kbd.jpg (179.4 KiB) Viewed 2017 times

At just 35 keys (plus a "track ball" which is really optical not a ball) it's more limited than even a 40% and the mounting is a lot less stable than it would have been on a Blackberry device, so it's not exactly easy to use for anything, but it still goes in my bag for Unix shell scripting option on-the-go. (Right shift key is mapped to ESC so that I can vi with this.)

I'm curious what else is out there that I haven't been able to find. I see people make scale model cases for Raspberry Pi and sometimes even scale monitors, but I've never seen the matching keyboards and mice (or trackballs). For infrequently used scale models, I think a micro keyboard that you can basically only type on with a stylus to hit the right keys could be cool, just I've never seen one.

[hellothere]

https://youtu.be/hrI761kRQPQ
https://www.ebay.com/itm/125385840010

Also Googled "Mini keyboard with trackball" and there a bazillion of them.

The ebay link is to a BTC keyboard that's similar to what I own. It doesn't have a trackpad or trackball, but it's got a bunch of shrunken keys and if I needed to take a random keyboard with me that I didn't care if it got stolen, that's the one I'd take. Or one of the 60% ones I have lying around .

[elithebearded]

Okay, yeah, there are a bazillion that are all wireless (bluetooth or dongle). That's really not very satisfactory to me. I've never had much luck with bluetooth, and the dongles get lost too easily.

[ArtyomTheMetroHopper]

To be fair thats as good as you going to get unless you look into making tiny keyboards yourself. You should be able to do it fairly easily thankfully, just find some small momentary stitches and do a matrix circuit. Wire it to a microcontroller and write up a keymap with QMK and flash it. Boom, you got a custom tiny keyboard!

[paperWasp]

What's the switch tech?

[elithebearded]

I found a trove of mini mechanical keyboard designs under the label "gherkin" at 40percent club:

https://www.40percent.club/search/label/gherkin

The Gherkin Express 3 is looking very appealing to me:

An altoids tin sized ortho keyboard that uses the board itself as a USB connector

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