Svalboard: Datahand Lives | Hacker News Reader

Svalboard: Datahand Lives

svalboard.com

75 pointsmorganvenable34 comments

My old Datahand keyboards were dying, so I decided to build a replacement and it took over my life

Svalboard combines the amazing magnetic key action of Datahand with a unique anatomical fitment system and integrated pointing devices to give the most customizable, lowest-effort keyboard and mouse solution ever built.

There's a super friendly Discord community, too: www.svalboard.com/discord

Oh man, Datahand, resurrected!

Datahands are amazing. With mere twitches of the finger you can hit any key on the keyboard.

I saved up for months while in college and bought a used one. 25 yrs ago they were $1,200... minimum wage was like $4/hr... so... it was "intended for insurance companies to pay" level of money.

If you have either RSI or just love experiencing new ways to do things, Datahand is amazing, and Svalboard looks every bit as good...

and... it's cheaper than it was 25 years ago... with two trackballs added on!

Really excited to see this project!

Better IMHO. The integration of pointing devices, especially the trackballs really changes the game.

You really just never take your hands off the keyboard, everything is in nice close range, etc. :)

You don't take your hand off the keyboard for cursor movement on Datahands either but yes, having two embedded trackballs is pretty sweet.

Aside...

Datahand moved RSI pain from my wrist to my knuckles. These keyboards don't magically prevent all RSI, which is ... only obvious if you actually think on it, which i didn't back then.

I wouldn't even compare mouse keys to what is done on Svalboard.

I know I personally found mouse keys unusable for day to day use, and another local DH users thought much the same, we had other pointers we used. (I used a fingerworks trackpad back when, clamped onto the side of the laplander, the other guy used a mouse, if I remember right.)

I used a combination of left- and right-handed vertical mice, and swapped between them depending on which hand was more painful at the time.

The amount of time wasted moving my hand from one keyboard-half or the other to the mouse and back was very substantial, and it meant compromising on a comfortable position of both.

Svalboard is way more comfortable!

I got one recently. It has a learning curve, but it’s been really fun. It’s infinitely customizable like no other keyboard. The magnetic switches feel really good. I feel like I am in a cyberpunk novel when I use it.

I owe two Datahands and used them daily for 15+ years before switching to Svalboard. I could type over 60WPM within the first hour - it's a very, very easy transition if you're already used to it! It took me a couple of months to get fully comfortable with Datahand, but a lot of this was learning how to quiet down unintentional finger movements, since you're using small muscles in unfamiliar ways.

Svalboard is way more adjustable (and therefore comfortable!) than Datahand - especially if you have small hands. It's also a massive, massive advantage to be able to change the keymap so easily - since it's running QMK underneath, you can use an online JavaScript-based tool to change any key to anything else! (and there are 15 shiftable layers, so you can also set up layers for individual apps or games etc). Macro support is great but the true killer app is integrating pointing devices into each side. Datahand had a very clunky up/down/left/right mouse emulation system, but it was incredibly awkward to use and therefore most users had a mouse as well. With integrated pointing (trackballs, Trackpoint or touchpad - mix and match) you never need to lift your hands out of the keyboard, so you can concentrate on finding a comfortable position without having to compromise so your mouse fits. The trackballs G Worm great, and using one for scrolling feels very smooth. Plus, there's an active user community constantly hacking in new features :)

The price gets mentioned a lot, and yes it is expensive. It's still cheaper than taking time off work, and for the amount of thought and design time it embodies, is probably undervalued. It's easy to fall into the trap of only considering the material costs of production now that the design is fairly stable, but bearing in mind this is one person's full-time job. There's also a very generous return policy, and a "let's try to make this work" option for students etc - so it's actually not as bad as it might seem at first glance.

Disclaimer: I'm a happy paying customer with very serious hand RSI and a long history of somewhat-successful surgical repairs. Svalboard allows me to continue working for hours at a stretch, where a flat keyboard would have me unproductive and in pain within half an hour. It might not suit everyone, but it makes a huge difference for those of us that need it!

I've been using one for over a year now, and I really like it. Ended up finding out about it from the Glove80 discord.

Now, I help out with their firmware updates, as a volunteer, just keeping things somewhat sane and debugged. Adding features as needed, to support new pointers, etc etc.

Disclaimer: My views are my own, I get provided hardware to do firmware work, and that's it. I do not work for Svalboard, etc.

As an extremely happy Glove80 user (Sunaku's Engrammer layout for those curious), I will watch this keyboard's career with great interest. I can definitely see it in my future (the Glove80's were recent enough (first one a couple years ago, and one more recent for home use) that unfortunately it would be an irrational purchase to make now)

__BUT__ say I wanted to ditch a KVM switch for some reason, and set up a second workstation at home...

My one complaint for the glove80 is it feels like it was made for someone's hands that are __a little__ larger than mine (I do have some sausage stubbs), so the adjustable clusters are interesting to me! However, I do also have an Azeron Cyborg II at home, which uses a similar idea, the clusters on that __do__ adjust, but at the smallest adjustment its still kind of uncomfortable for me; any small-small-hand users have experience reports with this one?

On the discord there are some really small handed users. If that's your concern, join the discord, and I'm sure folks will nerd out with ya to figure it out. :)

Love it, an irresponsible purchase might be well near~ I see you're a longstanding contributor to the project! Discord is joined, will plan to browse after hours :^)

Can you use the Azeron as a keyboard, and does it work well for it?

Azeron is definitely meant to be used as a half, its more of a dense keypad than a keyboard (main purpose is for gaming).

For $1,475 CAD, imma gonna have to stick with my DVORAK-hardwired Unicomp 104 buckling spring and my Kensington Expert Mouse.

Glad to see this kind of a system back in play, but this is employer-paid or insurance-paid level of cost. Even the heaviest of my iron - all 256Gb, dual-socket, 40c/80t of it - doesn’t cost this much.

That looks interesting. I have been dreaming of a travel workstation: A powerful phone for the computer, one handed chorded keyboard for input and smart glasses for display. Should fit in a pocket or at most a small bag. Wonder if I could buy just one of the pair, and adjust system to switch sides when needed.

The left and right halves are actually independent: either one can act as main or sub side. So yes, this would work fine, you'd just need to arrange your keymap to only use one hand - which is trivial since everything is configurable through QMK using Vial or KeyBard (an improved, JavaScript clone of the Vial Web editor with some Svalboard-specific features).

In practice this behaviour is really useful: I put different keymaps for Windows vs OSX on each hand, and the keyboard uses one or the other depending on which hand is plugged in as master. Swapping is trivial, as the USB cables are interchangeable and magnetic :-)

I couldn't see till the end of the video https://youtu.be/SPoOlYWcCvU , but it is the kind of nerd things that I love in the Internet

65 WPM shown on the video seems low, not good for a demo video. I wonder if somebody speedier on a normal keyboard can type faster using the Svalboard.

Here's a demonstration of 120 WPM on the Lalboard, the base/inspiration for Svalboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMhOIgrdeE0

I'm currently sitting at around 90 WPM on the Svalboard - slower than I was on a normal keyboard but now pain-free.

In the end, most of us using these keyboards care much less about speed than comfort. Not to say you can't go fast, people do.

Giving people back pain free use of their hands, and pain free computer is much more important IMHO.

Is it possible to press multiple keys on opposite axes at the same time? E.g. q and z or w and x on the qwerty layout.

The keyboard supports it, but your hands likely do not! You likely can't flex and extend your fingers simultaneously.

If you really wanted to do this for some reason (chording?) you could use too-small finger keys and press harder. But this would defeat the main point which is to be aggressively ergonomic.

My kit got shipped yesterday. Super excited!

Reminds of a something I read ages ago but couldn't find just now with a five-second google search...

Basically someone got a few promotions and realized he didn't want to get promoted any more as it moved him farther and farther from the work he liked (think, someone that likes programming that keeps getting promotions into management). So, one day he bought a big feather quill pen and started using that instead of a regular pen and never got promoted again...

Looks interesting, although it's far, far away of my price point for a custom keyboard.

When the question becomes:

- Lose your career as a computer user.

- Surgery.

- Try funky expensive keyboard with lots of research behind it, and tons of testimonials.

The funky expensive keyboard suddenly looks like the cheap option.

If you don't value your time, or enjoy 3d printing and assembling stuff, kits get shipped every few months, with all the electronics, and access to the files needed to 3d print the board.

I'm typing this on a board I printed. If I valued my time at my hourly rate, the price listed is dirt cheap. But I enjoyed doing it :)

I have a problem with that. I've seen how disabled users are milked out of their money (or their insurance, if they have one that covers it) just because they don't have another option. And I know, economy of scale and everything, but most of the time the huge price differences aren't justified (like commented in the $1K wheelchair post [0]). I've seen it with software (simple pictoric augmentative communication software for iPad that costs hundreds of dollars, plus some DLCs...), and in hardware (consumer hardware that costs 1 or 2 hundred dollars, but is firmware locked so it cannot be used in augmentative communication software. You have to pay a thousand or two for the unlocked versión).

Also, sadly, the salaries in my country aren't that high that it makes it look cheap compared to do it yourself.

  0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711437

To be very clear: Svalboard's firmware is on GitHub, and releases are made using github actions. GPLv3.

There is a reason kits are offered, and in part it is due to cost.

That said, if there is a true need, talk to the owner. I've watched this business for a while. I have enough parts to have Svalboards forever. But I decide to stay and help, because his heart is in the right place with regards to this whole thing.

That said, he has to put food on the table, and I respect that.

It's also quite a bit cheaper than unsuccessful physiotherapy, occupational therapy and other medical interventions. And no, simply lifting weights does not fix all musculoskeletal issues (RSI).

I'd say it's well worth the price for people that need it!

Niche products don't benefit from Economies of Scale, so this is par for the course, my glove80's were about $600 a piece

was a bit hard for me to find, but here's a video of the trackball being used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCXgPqlpZeM

> Big hands? Small hands? Wonky finger lengths? Broke a pinky when you were three and now it's all janky? We've got you.

Cut half your right thumb off on a table saw? Ah, OK, enjoy your conventional keyboard :)

If it's only half. There's a chance it'll work :). You can mount a finger cluster up as a thumb cluster if you want. A custom bracket to get it to the right spot. Not totally infeasible :)

But as with all things adaptive and ergo, it depends on the nature of the injury, etc, etc, etc.

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