Possible Off-the-Shelf Keyboard to support LEAP keys on COTS Swyftware

[B.Person]

Just saw this in my Tech Blog surfing.

Status:  Pre-Kick Starter

Adding it to my "Check It Out" list.

Thought others might want to know.


        https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/


Bruce

[dwight]

The Cat key board has no encoder chip. It is scanned
by the Cat mother board. Most PC keyboards have a serial
interface.
It would be possible to use any matching matrix keyboard
with the same number of strobes and inputs.
The arrangement of the keys can be modified in the lookup
table in ROM.
Dwight

 

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Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2015 06:52:59 -0800
From: bruce....@gmail.com
To: cano...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [Canon Cat] Possible Off-the-Shelf Keyboard to support LEAP keys on COTS Swyftware

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[B.Person]

Whoops, my error in not stating this with greater clarity.
Please excuse my causing a misdirection in any one's thinking
that this would work as a CAT keyboard replacement.

I'm thinking about porting Swyftware to a currently in production
piece of hardware ala' 2015 time frame, like an Amazon Fire Tablet
and/or Raspberry Pi.  Not a replacement part for the CAT hardware.

I like it because this is the closest COTS keyboard that I've seen
that will give the option of LEAP key assignments near the space bar.

Again please excuse the misdirection.
Bruce

[Charles Springer]

Costs are always going down for this kind of thing. I would love to do a Cat keyboard to run the software on a Linux PC. Actually, since I sell quad core 1.5GHz low power ARM boards that run Debian, I would build a whole system, including display driver, into the keyboard and use SD cards for mass storage. It would cost $100 to $150 and use any old LCD monitor or a 7" or 10" color LCD. Drivers for those are built in now.

Kickstarter?

-- Charlie

--

[Russell Nelson]

A flat keyboard is pretty low-tech to produce. Would you have one PCB
for the keyboard, and put your ARM board onto it as a daughterboard?

[Charles Springer]

It can go either way, but the ARM is a 6 layer board and the KB is 2 layers so it is cheaper to use two boards. The NanoPC-T1 is smaller than a BBB or a Pi and has much better graphics and LCD support plus CSI/MIPI in/out video. We can config to run all the pi and BBB OS stuff and more. I use Debian and Python with PyQt for embedded these days.

http://andahammer.com/t1-nanopc/

This thing can retail below $40 if it has to.

-- Charlie