When Apple introduced the primary iPhone, I (typing on my Samsung BlackJack) confidently acknowledged that it will by no means succeed. Why? As a result of no person would wish to do any typing on a touchscreen keyboard. Boy, was I fallacious… Nonetheless, even after switching to touchscreen smartphones like everybody else, I’m nonetheless satisfied that they provide an inferior typing expertise. That’s why I’m so intrigued by Redditor Spacerower’s Compad V2, which is a Raspberry Pi-based pill that encompasses a chorded keyboard for quick typing.
For the uninitiated, a chorded keyboard is one that may produce the entire typical alphanumeric characters and punctuation with only a handful of keys. Pioneered and popularized by the stenography trade (although stenographic keyboard act a bit in another way, based mostly on phonetics), it really works by tying every character to a selected key mixture, like taking part in a chord on a piano. On this case, the Compad V2 has a complete of simply 14 keys in a modified ASETNIOP structure. Eight of these, situated on the again of the pill, are meant for the index, center, ring, and pinky fingers. The opposite six, situated on the entrance, are for the thumbs. The six thumb keys are shift, ctrl, alt, left mouse, proper mouse, and a layer change for the numeric keys.
That chorded keyboard alone would make the Compad V2 noteworthy, nevertheless it appears to be a well-designed pill total. The guts of the gadget is a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B (4GB mannequin), which Spacerower paired with a 7” touchscreen LCD. Along with the keys for the chorded keyboard, the pill additionally has two Blackberry-style trackballs on the entrance panel. One capabilities because the mouse and scroll wheel, whereas the opposite replicates a keyboard’s arrow keys.
Energy comes from 4 2,500mAh lithium batteries, for a complete capability of 10,000mAh—rather a lot for a transportable gadget like this. Even higher, Spacerower designed a customized energy management system that makes use of a Raspberry Pi Pico improvement board to first safely shut down the Raspberry Pi 4 after which to chop off energy to it completely. The Pico additionally acts as an interface between the keyboard and Raspberry Pi 4, so it isn’t superfluous.
The 3D-printed enclosure, which appears fairly darn trendy, even makes all 40 of the Raspberry Pi 4’s GPIO pins externally accessible.