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Comment by mercuryrising | Hacker News Reader

That's an awesome chord keyboard - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY#t=2039 I've always wondered why more people don't use them. It seems significantly less prone to errors - instead of fat fingers or incorrect placement, you have to coordinate the timing between the fingers.

It's pretty amazing how much that video demonstrates. I wonder what the next version of that video will be. Hopefully it's not computer related.

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I'd like to try one, but there appears to be basically no such thing as a bluetooth-enabled one-hand chord keyboard that you are intended to hold in your hand (as opposed to having on a table), and that's the use case I'm interested it... an input device for my augmented reality glasses while I'm walking around. On that note, if they're ever going to make a... well... can't really make a comeback if you never made an appearance at all... an appearance, that's probably the scenario that will drive them. Voice may cover casual usage, but when you really need to go to town you're going to need something more, and no current input device can meet that need.

Port 8pen to the PS3 navigation controller (one-handed joystick device)?

Sadly I think neat keyboards are patent encumbered.

There have been things like the Frogpad, or the Twiddler. But they're expensive and not available anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrogPad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciQVBNHrKKA

I totally agree, I think their time has come and it'd be great if someone could rescue the tech from all these dead or dying companies and provide a decent chording keyboard for people on the move.

Perhaps Morse code would make for a neat device, too.

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you could probably make a prototype pretty easily. A battery, some buttons, and a bluefruit[1] should be enough to make one. You would likely need to also write some kind of input translator (Custom android keyboard or so?) to wrap/ convert the value from straight key presses to your combinations (since you want a combination of key presses to give you just one character). 3D print a case, and you're probably all set to go.

I mean, it's likely easier said than done, and would take some time and effort, but it's probably also pretty do-able.

[1]http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/09/27/new-product-bluefrui...

Since Arduino can be programmed to function as a keyboard[1], wouldn't that be an easier option? Then you can put the chording logic on the Arduino board and have it function like a plain USB keyboard otherwise as far as the computer is concerned[2] (that's kind of how the Makey Makey[3] works - it's also Arduino based).

[1] http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/KeyboardWrite

[2] http://store.arduino.cc/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPa...

[3] http://www.makeymakey.com/

Yeah, you should be able to do that as well. There are a lot of different ways you could make a project like this work, I was just wanting to throw out an example to show that we're empowered to do these kinds of things now. We don't have to wait for some company to come out with a portable, bluetooth chording keyboard anymore, we can do these kinds of things ourselves. I think that is really exciting!

I've always heard that type of input device called a twiddler, I found one when googling "bluetooth twiddler": http://www.handykey.com/

* I'm an idiot, that was a top link because they're using the name twiddler, but they don't seem to offer bluetooth.

I poked around Google quite a bit a few months ago. If you drop any one of my adjectives, you can come up with something, but the full gamut does not appear to exist.

I've been looking at this recently too. I like the basic design of chordite http://chordite.com/

7 keys across four fingers, and then perhaps a trackpoint for the thumb.

In terms of a bluetooth gpio controller, there are a few options including a few that have been kickstarted recently (e.g. bleduino and rfduino).

It wouldn't be very useful without NLS. It wasn't intended for text entry but to select commands to execute while the mouse selected the target for the commands, ie you would enter DW for "delete word" with the chorded keyboard and use the mouse to select the word to delete.

It disappeared because the people a Xerox Labs decided it was too hard for normal people to learn to interact with a computer in this way, so they replaced the chorded keyboard with on-screen buttons plus a set of keys on the left of the keyboard for the most used operations (Undo, Open, Copy, Paste, etc). Then Apple, to make things even friendlier, removed the extra buttons from the keyboard entirely and relegated the most frequently used operations to key combinations (Cmd-C, Cmd-X, Cmd-V, etc). You will notice that many shortcuts are relegated to the left side of the keyboard.

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