Foone Turing, higher often called Foone on Twitter, thinks keyboards are too regular. If keyboards had problem sliders, Foone needs to max them out to nightmare. That is why they made a physics-designed keyboard the place the keys have been sprinkled onto a PCB and a tweet takes six minutes to jot down.
You understand that person who pecks at their keyboard as a substitute of resting their arms at it like most individuals do? Think about deliberately recreating that have after which think about proudly sharing it with the world.
I requested Foone what their deal is with keyboards.
“So I’ve a interest of constructing horrible keyboards, that is simply the newest one in that collection,” they mentioned. It seems, Foone has gotten away with this many times before, which possibly is unsurprising since they’re additionally the individual that put Doom on a pregnancy test. They’ve made all the pieces from a keyboard that must be toggled with binary, to at least one that requires floppy disks inserted for each letter, and one that’s GPS-based—for some motive.
Foone detailed your complete course of of constructing the physics-designed keyboard in a prolonged Twitter thread. It began with a program that jumbled the keys up. Then, they needed to make a PCB that will help keys in numerous rotations and discover even-shaped keycaps. It took just a few tries to get it proper as a result of Foone stored discovering sure symbols weren’t accessible within the drivers they wrote and that the PCB warped over time. Regardless of the problems, Foone was in a position to report a six minute video the place they kind on it.
“I am making an attempt to kind perform+6 [in the video], however I kind perform+9 as a substitute, as a result of guess what? The 9 is the wrong way up from the place I am sitting,” they wrote.
Foone instructed me that, regardless of what you could suppose after seeing this monstrosity, they’re a QWERTY format fan and a standard keyboard person. Their keyboard antics are, partially, to make mechanical keyboard nerds squirm.
“I typically joke about ‘making an attempt to make keyboards so horrible they make /r/mechanicalkeyboards customers explode at 20 paces,'” they mentioned.
This “historic beef” with the mechanical keyboard neighborhood started with one person popularizing a way of taking retro IBM keyboards, ripping the center out of them, and turning them into low cost, trendy mechs. This poses an issue for Foone, who has previous IBM PCs that want keyboards with the unique elements to work.
“Due to a bunch of mechanical keyboard geeks making an attempt to avoid wasting money, I can not get them, as they’re now costly and often pre-modded, and modding them makes them ineffective to me,” they mentioned.
Thus, Foone has no plans to cease their keyboard crimes, or experiments as they’re extra precisely described.
“I’ve positively not made an unlawful keyboard but,” Foone mentioned.
Earlier than I allow them to go, I did pitch them on a keyboard made from ice, the place you lose performance over time. It might be a race to get your phrases out. Keyboard “any%” speedruns might grow to be a factor.
“Ice is a good suggestion,” they mentioned. “I appear to recollect I used to be experimenting with one thing regarding ice however by no means bought wherever. In all probability as a variant on the touch-sensitive concept, as a result of ice is conductive so you can also make a capacitive sensor out of it.”
I will be ready for the ice-board updates on Foone’s Twitter. For now, I am making an attempt my greatest to overlook watching six excruciating minutes of essentially the most chaotic keyboard I’ve ever seen.
