April 26, 2024

leehotti

Technology and Computer

Poly Keyboard Has Screens In Every Key

A left-hand side unit of a split keyboard. The keys are black with RGB lighting and the key legends are displayed on small OLED screens in each key.

Aspiring polyglots can be stymied by differing keyboard layouts and character sets when switching in between languages. [Thomas Pollak]’s Poly Keyboard circumvents this challenge by placing a screen in each and every important of the keyboard.

In his intensive develop logs, [Pollak] particulars the various issues he’s faced whilst bringing this astounding keyboard to existence. For instance, the OLED screens need glyph rendering to deal with the legends on the keys. Given that the objective is correct universal language guidance, he employed the Adafruit-GFX Library as a starting and was able to lengthen assist to Japanese, Korean, and Arabic so far in his personalized fork of QMK.

The focus to depth on this build is actually spectacular. Beside the perseverance to full glyph assistance, [Pollak] has measured the amount of extra pressure the flex cables from the OLEDs insert to the actuation of the keyswitches. For the Gateron yellow swap he examined, the distinction was about 62.2 g as opposed to the preliminary 49.7 g.

In situation you are thinking you’ve noticed other display keyboard tasks, [Pollak] involves a roundup of similar assignments in his logs as properly. This is not the to start with keyboard we’ve observed right here at Hackaday with an OLED on top of a keyswitch, whilst [Voidstar Lab]’s MiRage only has three monitor keys that were eradicated in a afterwards iteration. If you’d like a far more conventional set screen in your keyboard, examine out [Peng Zhihui]’s modular board with an e-ink display and haptic opinions knob.