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Comment by qwery | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know the "other times this has been tried" all have had individual displays (and controllers) in each key. The difference being that here there is just one panel under the whole board with most of the parts above the display being transparent. This approach should be far less complicated to build, more robust and cheaper.

Honestly, I don't think I need an LCD in my keyboard but I'd quite like to have a go on some mAgLeV hall effect switches! On that note, if you like magnets and/or keebs you might be interested in Void switches[0] -- 3D printable hall effect switches

[0] https://github.com/riskable/void_switch

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Looks like a nice use case for eink IMO, as I don't see the point of having video playing under my keys but having keycaps that can change depending on the context sounds nice.

I remember seeing this _exact_ comment back in the late 2000s and being really excited for an eInk keyboard. eInk was always a super cool tech that was _just_ around the corner, but after almost 15 years I'm disapointed that it's applications have been largely restricted to eReades.

It would be extremely cool to finally end the constant pain of either overpaying for a laptop with my country's localization on the keyboard or straight up using a keyboard from a different country and just not looking at the keyboard since the buttons are all different when you set the software localization to my own country. eInk under every key, would of course be expensive at first but it would mean that the keyboards would now only have to be developed for US and got the ISO standard.

My stationary computer has Slovenian layout (which is where I'm from), Chromebook has German (where I also bought the laptop) layout because I couldn't find the same model for anywhere close to the same price in Slovenia (which is very common, most electronics I've bought have been from Germany or elsewhere just not Slovenia, because even including the shipping it's still cheaper.

But I still set the software keyboard layout to Slovenian, which means that the stuff that's printed on the keyboard is useless to me...

If anyone is looking for an excellent website to compare prizes and find products in Europe, I highly recommend geizhals.eu, the filter options make it so that you can basically build your own laptop, they are really amazing!

Especially when it's bright. I can imagine under direct sunlight the keyboard loses some of its appeal. Whatever.

If you don’t have the displays in the keys themselves, the symbols get really hard to see at the angles users typically use. I don’t typically look directly down at my keyboard as it’s not in my lap.

True. If it had short travel large keys (like on current MacBook Airs) with thin keys it would be better. I wouldn't mind having mechanical instead of magnetic suspension on the sides of keys and non-transparent (i.e. metal) gaps between keys (as it is now, again, with MacBook Air) as having a pretty big picture of video shown in the background is completely unnecessary, being a bother actually, distracting and annoying. Basically transparent material thin keys looking through many small windows into the single background display that may show whatever letters or small pictures (in high resolution) we want for each key.

Theoretically the glyph images could be offset. That is, there could be a setting so that they are all shifted upwards slightly so they appear neared the centre of the key when sitting back.

Of course, this does nothing to help if your position relative to the keyboard changes more dynamically throughout your usage.

It's basically a big streamdeck...

For a simpler but different-feeling option, you can also use rubber domes and glue, e.g. https://github.com/geoffder/dometyl-keyboard/#another-dactyl...

It's a shame that attempts to build open hardware and firmware for Topre/Niz-style capacitative rubber domes haven't gone anywhere over the years. Unless I'm out of the loop, people are still stuck yanking PCBs and controllers out of their Realforces and HHKBs to use domes in custom builds.

This is the closest I've seen: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=11734

One could use those silicon popper OCD toys as a keyboard construction method. Still might need some sort of compliant spring mechanism with hysteresis.

Some Japanese did. https://goropikari.hatenablog.com/entry/diy_ec_keyboard

Are there actual custom keyboard PCPs and controllers that support these? That would be pretty damn cool to have a maglev keyboard.

There's a kicad library [0] and (STM32F4*) firmware in rust [1] on riskable's github.

Ed: Untested Void Switch Reference PCB Implementation [2]

[0] https://github.com/riskable/void_switch_kicad

[1] https://github.com/riskable/riskeyboard70

[2] https://github.com/riskable/void_switch_65_pct

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