The file 'Wireless Chording Keyboard 3D Printer Model' is (stl) file type, size is 12.3KB.
THE PHOTOS: Are mostly of the OLD design these STLs are meant to pretty-up, but illustrate how to make one without a 3D printer.
WHAT IS IT?
A Chording Keyboard is a one-handed (usually) input device, where you type keystrokes by pressing combinations of buttons. Kind of like playing Guitar Hero. It's also called a Keyer. All the commercially available designs are bulky, old, and stupid, but the basic idea of a chording keyboard is a great one for wearable computing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyer
I've always wanted to produce this design -- poor guy gave up before everyone on the planet had a 3D printer: http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/
MY DESIGN:
But my design is nothing of the sort. I put this together a while back, before I had a 3D printer, myself. If you want to go that route, you can... there's no reason to use my STLs, and they're not even complete. So this is basically a very old project I am resurrecting now that I have more resources; but this version is basically the old resource-starved version.
It's based around a Nintendo Wii remote. These things are amazing devices for hardware hacking; the wiimote unit itself contains:
You can find Wiimotes on sale as low as $15; normally about $30. There is no other way to get this kind of functionality attached to an ATMega/Arduino for twice the price. Probably significantly more.
WHAT YOU NEED:
This little project doesn't even use an ATMega or Arduino (yet) - all you need is a wiimote, some appropriate buttons, and a way to put/hold it all together.
WHAT YOU GET:
The only software I am providing assumes you are running Linux, and will only work there. But it would be trivial for anyone with knowledge of their operating system to modify for their purposes; the libraries it relies on are available on all platforms. All you need to do is know how to hook into your OS's input queue so you can imitate a keyboard/mouse.
WHAT IT CAN DO:
WIP WHY:
ABOUT THE STL:
The STL published is a slightly fixed version of the one in the photos, which has too-thin walls and too little space between index finger and thumb buttons.
WHERE THE SOFTWARE LIVES:
https://github.com/ScribbleJ/WiimoteKeyer
keyer-grip.stl | 173.8KB |