Mechanical Keyboards and Ambient Information
Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts have sprung a DIY trend in keyboard hacking. It could evolve the input device we often overlook.
Many great overviews exist about all of the facets you can customize. If you feel unfamiliar, you might enjoy this article more after the jump to a good guide.
The keyboard maker WASD is innovating a new keyboard (the Das 5Q, on Kickstarter) where you can control the per-key backlight colors, via input from could services. Imagine your IFTTT or zapier feed causing certain key backlights to flash when some events are occurring. A ‘VIP’ email, your smart-home alarm, the washing machine, local wifi congestion, etc.
In other words, people will have new ways to hack you.
Security will be solved as well as ever is, and the Das 5Q is an interesting idea for ambient data. Yet, I presume this won’t catch on until OLED keys are more widely available & usable.
You might recall the major exposure most had to OLED keys, in the form of Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus keyboard. A beautiful device sealed comfortably in the ivory tower of most luxury commodities. It regardless sent my imaginations running. But could it become more of a consumer system? Is there a place & need for it to be?
Thinking in current-mechanical-keyboard design, it seemed the board and switches would largely be the same, but with OLED keys. Then we need to send data to keys, which maybe Input Club will solve. (c.f. a guide to keyboards and their parts) Even then, the switches would need to change, since keys have no socket or wiring to them.
As it turns out, it seems that Art Lebedev hit the same issue, and it moving to solve it in the forthcoming Optimus Popularis and Optimus Aux. The Popularis seems to make a rather genius invention on the OLED key/switch problem. Rather than wire the key, the OLED seems to be in the switch. Then the key is just a lens, which enlarges and rectifies the optics! You can see it in the comparison of the keys:
The right-most one (4th) is just a lens, whereas the 3rd is an OLED + lens/key. The 4th is the newer model design. Now the innovation challenge is in the switch. There are already moving parts in there and other issues, and it seems Lebedev found that the best this was to make the keycap a single-shot part with good optics.
In an oblique way, this is the direction of Apple’s Touch Bar: isolate the complexity as much as possible. Not that such is their only approach. A 2015 patent from Apple introduces keyboard buttons with a hybrid design that incorporates touch sensitivity. (As I have yet to scrape a patent that clearly demonstrates the 2017 MacBook Pro low-profile low-travel keys, I wonder if the 2015 modified dome design lead to the most recent generation of MBP keys)
Lebedev’s OLED keys change the game a bit, especially if Input Club’s keyboad layout language format (KLL) can accommodate more per-key control than just voltage (to the LED), and the switch on/off. Then there is no real barrier to using such a board on any operating system.
I’m really thinking something more like an OLED pad. I like the notion of every key being OLED, but at the moment my inspiration for using it is limited to ops & monitoring graphs. I can see configuring one service for each key, then the key jumps to that admin. I see these design pattern in Tableau Mobile, with small component graphs and data ‘bytes.’
If I could get OLED on the numpad portion of a 104-key, I’d do it. I think that will be too bespoke for cost, and an OLED keypad will pair with a good TKL.
I’ll probably go that direction.
