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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Author here if there are any questions...

Hey, great to see this, thank you so much, Ken!

I'm lucky to own an original Engelbart mouse and chord keyset too, and I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them, making 3d printable models, and embedding metal and electronic parts so they work via bluetooth!

The first step is to take it apart, measure and weigh the pieces, 3d scan it, and make a realistic 3d printable all plastic model (like an easy-to-print toy), but then refine it to make a high quality hybrid version with the exact same weight and feel and materials and electronics using resin printing and off the shelf hardware like the wheel, so it feels as realistic as possible and actually works!

I think reproducing the actual weight and feel of the original is really important, the klunky feel of the wheel attached to the potentiometer hitting the rotation limit, how it scrapes across the table, etc. It's really amazing to hold and feel in your own hand, and it belongs in a hands-on museum like the Exploratorium, but it would quickly get destroyed. So it would be great if anyone who wants could 3d print their own quick and easy plastic replica, or assemble their own high quality functional replica too.

I want to release the simple model and detailed plans to make your own for free, and think it would be a great kit or pre-assembled gadget that the Computer History Museum could sell in the gift store.

It would also be cool to include an accelerometer and gyro in it so it would also work as a gestural game controller -- why not: it would be so cheap and easy to add!

Here are some parts I'm considering using, but I'm new to this stuff -- what do people with more experience think?

  Microcontroller: ESP32-S3 module (USB + Bluetooth capabilities)
  Motion Sensor: MPU6050 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope
  2× 10KΩ potentiometers for X/Y tracking wheels
  3× tactile buttons with pull-up resistors
  3.7V LiPo battery (350-500mAh)
  TP4056 charging module
  USB-C connector (for both charging and wired mode)

I'd love to discuss the project with you, a free open non-profit labor of love, and I hope we can collaborate! I just invested in a Bambu 3d printer and Raptor 3d scanner just for this project, so I'm ready to get started scanning and printing. Please drop me an email at: don@donhopkins.com

Hi Don. I think this stuff is great, and applaud your work, so don’t think of this as a slight (depending on the answer, of course): how practical is this? Again, if the answer is approximately “not at all practical”, that’s fair, but I guess I could also see it fitting somewhere on a spectrum like emacs vs vi, QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc…

People preserve past technology for various reasons, but I have always appreciated the investment lessons about what persists... and what faded away.

For example, most modern architectures were not the best choice, and have pigeonholed both AMD and Intel for decades. =3

I’m doing it for the looks and feels. Making it public and open so others can take a look and feel free. (Ha ha, I got a billion of 'em!) ;)

It does have a distinctive visual look and physical feel. And while it’s not as sleek or ergonomic as the latest Logitech mouse (who gave him an office at their headquarters from 1992 to 2007), it’s pretty great to actually touch and hold -- just to grasp firsthand how far input devices have come.

(Okay, now I’ve got nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-something of 'em!)

1) Historic Firsts: The Mouse

https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/162/

>Logitech celebrates "ONE BILLION MICE SOLD!" making headlines in 2008. See their press release, blog post, and billionth mouse celebration page with links to press kits, fun facts, and timelines. The event coincided with our 40th anniversary celebration of Doug's landmark demo, titled "Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing". Enjoy the following timeline from Logitech's celebrations.

1.0e+9) Logitech Ships Billionth Mouse. Coincides with Fortieth Anniversary of First Computer Mouse Public:

https://ir.logitech.com/press-releases/press-release-details...

>"What a wonderful coincidence that the leading mouse manufacturer has announced such a significant milestone in the same month that we celebrate Doug Engelbart's legendary public debut of the computer mouse," said Curt Carlson, president and chief executive officer of SRI International. "Logitech's product innovations support Engelbart's vision of human-computer tools for interactive and collaborative work."

∞) Doug Engelbart obituary:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/04/doug-enge...

>After that, Engelbart set up the tiny Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina, which survives as the Doug Engelbart Institute, providing a useful history of his life and times. From 1992 to 2007, Engelbart was given an office at Logitech's headquarters, before finally returning to SRI some 30 years after he had left it.

I might be misunderstanding, but are you talking solely about the most here? I'm mostly curious about the chorded "keyboard"(?) as an input device - have you spent time with it as a daily driver? How does it compare to a traditional keyboard? I would guess a keyboard would be easier for a beginner, because ~1 key per symbol, and the keycaps are all printed (though I'm sure many of us remember our untrained selves scanning the entire keyboard intently, looking for whatever letter had eluded us) - so chorded input would be more of a learning wall than a learning curve, but once that's achieved... is chorded input ~100% speed of a QWERTY kb, or 10%, or 150%? Is it more or less tiring, physically and mentally? Very interested in your experience.

>I want to make usable replicas by 3d scanning them

Cool, the artifacts should be preserved for people studying new haptics device designs.

The MPU6050 is not a great IMU, but the cost might be your best option.

>USB-C connector

One can force the interface into legacy USB 2.0 HID mode, and I would highly recommend that approach if you are excluding a USBC device PMIC. The TP4056 also have some weirdness about entering charge modes, and exiting trickle mode.

Would recommend contacting some museum staff if additional hardware is missing:

https://vintagegeek.com/

Best of luck =3

Just the kind of advice and wisdom I was hoping to hear, thank you! What would your ideal pick of hardware components be? Cost is not a major factor, since the cost of manufacturing a high quality durable case and sourcing the other materials will probably overwhelm the cost of the electronics. Universal usability and battery life and rechargeability are quite important though. So no "different thinking" charging cable ports on the bottom, pfft!

> What would your ideal pick of hardware components be?

In general, cheap 3.3v based devices just use disposable 2x AA battery with a reasonably good LDO regulator, as they do not burn a lot of power that 2000mAh can last a long time. For a Bluetooth device, I would just leave the USB features/port/cable off to save on the design cost, and the sanity of DIY folks going cross-eyed trying to get a 0.5mm contact-pitch plug soldered. lol

The IMU chips all have trade-offs, but I usually prefer an i2c chip with interrupt event pin (wake-from-sleep or sample-ready interrupt.) Also, many modern gyro chips have pre-filters built right into the chip itself, and can save a lot of cycles/DSP mcu side.

Not sure about the development state of the ESP32 Bluetooth library, but these chips are generally not known for their power efficiency or accurate a2d functions. If I recall, last time I chose a nordic semiconductor chip because of the power efficiency, and everything else was unavailable.

Best of luck =3

I would suggest being sure to use a cpu platform well supported by ZMK to make your HID software easier. The esp32-s3 doesn't appear to have Bluetooth support in ZMK yet. People who want Bluetooth support are being encouraged to use the nrf52 platform. People who want usb only might be better with a rp2040 as there is better support in ZMK for that platform than anything esp32.

Thank you for this, wonderful break down of some amazing history. I have watched that demo many many times in my pursuit of human computer interface thinking.

I often wondered what happened to this piece of hardware… I still hold a deep belief that our current input methods are flawed(as amazing as they are) and we are in need of another leap forward.

Anyway great read - thank you again.

How did Engelbart render black text on a white background during his 1968 Demo, considering that the display technology at the time was based on vector CRTs, which typically produced glowing light rather than dark areas?

Output was displayed on 5" CRTs. High-resolution TV cameras (875-line) transmitted the CRT output to 17" monitors at each work station. By flipping a switch, the video could be inverted, so you could get either black lines on a light background or white lines on a black background. In other words, Engelbart invented dark mode :-)

Crazy. This clearly demonstrates their focus on output, even at the expense of cost-effectiveness.

Was TREE-META directly linked to META-II?

As far as I can tell, TREE-META and META II were unrelated compiler compilers.

I vaguely remember the published description of TREE-META crediting META-II, though I might be confabulating that. More broadly, I don't think any compiler-compiler is unrelated to META-II.

Plausibly someone else in Engelbart's lab, or a group of people, invented it. He always complained about people assigning him credit for the whole team's output.

I always drop everything to read when there are new articles. Keep up the great work Ken!

Are there any opportunities for the local community to help preserve this history?

There’s a new development planned for the SRI site and I was hoping there’d be some honorary for that hallowed ground.

Christina Engelbart is working to preserve the history at the Doug Engelbart Institute: https://www.dougengelbart.org/

Thanks for writing this!

You misspelled "eidophor".

Brad Neuberg (the founder of coworking) worked with Doug about 15 years ago to hook up one of these keysets to a then-current computer to use Augment. Any idea what happened to that work?

(I see that "eidophor" is fixed.)

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