Okay, you have to see the gallery to appreciate it, but this keyboard was designed to resemble a red cedar tree with the green shell and wood bottom and the copper PCB showing through the tree cutouts on the sides.

Oh, and are those Nintendo Switch joysticks above the PS2 buttons? Those are for the mouse and vertical/horizontal scrolling. Honestly, this seems like a great amount of thumb controls. The basics are there (presumably), and there isn’t any thumb-extending excess, like keys on the insides by the mouse.

This bad mama jama runs on an RP2040 and has 50 hand-wired Cherry Brown switches plus the PS2 buttons. In the build guide, you can read all about [WesternRedCdar]’s troubles with integrating those. The Nintendo Switch joysticks weren’t terribly easy, either, since the ribbon connector can’t be soldered directly.

The final issue was one of weight. Since many of the switches stand quite tall, it sort of jostles the keyboard to actuate them. [WesternRedCdar] opined that that the ideal solution would have been to use metal base plates instead of wood, but took care of the issue by adding layers of 1/8″ steel flat bar inside the case.

Gone in 60 Seconds: the Micro Journal Rev. 7 From Tindie

Don’t know what took me so long to find r/writerDeck, but here we go! [WorkingAmbition7014] was quite excited to announce there that [Background_Ad_1810] aka [Un Kyu Lee]’s Micro Journal rev. 7 was up on Tindie. It’s already sold out, but that’s okay because previous versions are already open-source, and it’s just a matter of time before this new revision makes its way to the ole GitHub.

This distraction-free machine is based on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller. It starts up right away, and you can start typing pretty much immediately on the ePaper screen. There are a pair of knobs that go a long way toward its typewriter looks; the left one wipes the screen and puts the machine to sleep, and the right knob clears the screen in the case of too much ghosting.

Files are saved on the SD card that sits behind the screen, or you can send them to Google Drive. Now, it doesn’t come with that cool clip light, but it doesn’t have a backlight, either, so you’ll probably want to bring your own. You will also have to source your own 18650. Be sure to check out the overview after the break.

The Centerfold: Purple Paradise

I love these setup pictures, but I have to wonder, does anyone really keep their desk this clean and tidy? Of course not, it’s for the shot, you’re saying. But that’s my point. Why does everyone always tidy up so hard first? I want to see battle stations in their true forms sometimes. I feel like we got sorta close last week in the one with all the screens. So do I need to inspire centerfold submissions by showing my own battle station one of these times? I don’t know if y’all really want that.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Ford Typewriter

Isn’t this machine a beauty? And no, inventor Eugene A. Ford bore no relation to Henry Ford the automobile maker. But wouldn’t this look grand while perched briefly on the running board of your Model T for a quick daguerreotype?

Lovely as she was, the 1895 Ford was no fun for the typist. The Space bar-placed Shifts required real pressure to properly operate, and the keys are evidently springy and wobbly. “Springy” sounds intriguing; “wobbly” does not.

Additionally, the advancing lever doesn’t allow going backwards or forwards a line at a time. But the one great thing about the Ford was that it’s a visible writer, whereas most machines of the time were blind writers, meaning you were unable to see what you were typing without stopping and doing something first. It wasn’t the first visible writer, but it might be the easiest to look at.

What it did do first is use aluminium in its construction, although there were two versions, one with an all-aluminium frame and carriage, and the other with a black, enameled cast iron frame and and an aluminium carriage. The cast iron went for $75, and the lighter-weight aluminium machine for $85. Both were lateral thrust machines, which means that the type bars are spread out like a fan and move horizontally to strike the platen.

Eugene Ford had quite the career. After putting his typewriter on the market in 1895, he worked with IBM for the rest of his life, and became chief development engineer of the New York laboratories in 1911. During his tenure, he developed improvements to various punched card accounting machines, sorters, and counters.

Finally, a Keyboard for Cat Lovers

Cats and keyboards go together like peanut butter and jelly. When they’re not straight up walking across it, they’re fluffing it up. Well, why not admit defeat and get this cozy cat-themed keyboard?

This is the Dry Studio Petbrick 65, which comes in calico and black, which is called the odd-eyed design, presumably because the kitty on the Escape key has heterochromia.

Now that’s just the keyboard itself that comes in calico and black; soon you’ll be able to get all kinds of fuzzy bezels, which attach with magnets and are hand-washable, thankfully.

The Petbrick 65 isn’t just some cutesy little thing. This is a serious mechanical keyboard with a sandblasted POM plate, a specially-tuned (what? how?) cotton poron switch pad, PET film for the sake of acoustics, and two layers of sound-dampening foam.

The switches are custom-made ‘crystal pinks’ that were developed in-house and look pretty slick. If you don’t like them, the PCB is hot-swappable. And they didn’t stop there — the keycaps have dye-sublimated legends for longevity.

Would I type on this? I would, at least until it became uncomfortable for my RSI situation. I’m interested to try these crystal pink switches and feel the fluffiness of the frame on the heels of my hands.

Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

When it comes to writing, sometimes a computer or smartphone is just too distracting to keep on task. [vagabondvivant] found this to be the case and rolled their own distraction-free writing tool, the Foliodeck.

With the increasing availability of parts for cyberdecks, it’s not too surprising to see we’re seeing the emergence of the writerdeck. Typically designed to be a no frills word processing device, they are designed to help their creators focus on writing and not be subject to the myriad notifications present trying to work with a more general computing device or smartphone.

In this case, [vagabondvivant] took a classy looking planner folio and removed its paper management components to leave a fabric and leather shell. The heart of the assembly is a HiSense A5 eink smartphone magnetically attached to a piece of MDF cut to mate the phone to the planner shell. A 10 Ah powerbank slots into the MDF below the keyboard which is also magnetically attached, and the whole thing zips up nicely. Future improvements are planned like a hinge, so it doesn’t have to be propped against something and a custom-built mechanical keyboard.

This isn’t the first writerdeck we’ve seen, and we’ve seen some other writer-focused decks and typewriter replacements.

Writing out a few thousand words is easy. Getting them in the proper order, now that’s another story entirely. Sometimes you’ll find yourself staring at a blank page, struggling to sieve coherent thoughts from the screaming maelstrom swirling around in your head, for far longer than you’d care to admit. Or so we’ve heard, anyway.

Unfortunately, there’s no cure for writer’s block. But many people find that limiting outside distractions helps to keep the mental gears turning, which is why [Un Kyu Lee] has been working on a series of specialized writing devices. The latest version of the Micro Journal, powered by the ESP32, goes a long way towards achieving his goals of an instant-on electronic notebook.

The writing experience on the Micro Journal is unencumbered by the normal distractions you’d have on a computer or mobile device, as the device literally can’t do anything but take user input and save it as a text file. We suppose you could achieve similar results with a pen and a piece of paper…but where’s the fun in that? These devices are more widely known as writerdecks, which is an extension of the popular cyberdeck concept of hyper-personalized computers.

This newest Micro Journal, which is the fourth iteration of the concept for anyone keeping score, packs a handwired 30% ortholinear keyboard, a 2.8″ ILI9341 240×320 LCD (with SD card slot), ESP32 dev board, and an 18650 battery with associated charging board into a minimalist 3D printed enclosure.

Unable to find any suitable firmware to run on the device, [Un Kyu Lee] has developed his own open source text editor to run on the WiFi-enabled microcontroller. While the distraction-free nature of the Micro Journal naturally means the text editor itself is pretty spartan in terms of features, it does  allow syncing files with Google Drive — making it exceptionally easy to access your distilled brilliance from the comfort of your primary computing device.

While the earlier versions of the Micro Journal were impressive in their own way, we really love the stripped down nature of this ESP32 version. It reminds us a bit of the keezyboost40 and the EdgeProMX, both of which were entered into the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest.