N.B. I have cross-posted this email to the TinkerPhones mailing list, because it appeared to be relevant to both the TinkerPhones list and the arm-netbook list. I hope that this is considered acceptable by users of both lists. If not, please reply to let me know, and accept my apologies in advance. Thanks.
On 26/08/16 18:37, Sam Pablo Kuper wrote to arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk:
It would be great to have a housing for the EOMA68 that is of a similar form factor to one of these devices:
- DragonBox Pyra [1]
- Openbox Pandora [2]
- HTC Universal [3]
or even:
- HTC Dream [4]
That is, an enclosure that can fit in a pocket, and has:
- Hardware QWERTY keyboard
It might be naive of me, but my impression is that the hardest part of making a housing like this is probably getting the keyboard right. So many moving parts; such critical layout, tactility, and reliability requirements.
I figure there are two broad satisfactory options:
(1) Design and build keyboards using commonly available push-switches, combined with PCBs and housings made from designs released as Free Cultural Works.[0]
(2) Use off-the-shelf standalone miniature keyboards, at least for prototyping.
Of these, (1) is preferable, but it appears to be the most work. The Pyra and Pandora projects presumably invested much effort into creating their keyboards. Sadly, they have not made the designs available as free cultural works, AFAIK. (Besides, if I were making my own, I'd probably want it to have NKRO, and to be able to be swapped out a bit like an EOMA-68 computing card, so that the user could easily slide out their QWERTY keyboard and replace it with a miniature version of the Stenoboard[1] or suchlike.)
Therefore, in pursuit of (2), I made a spreadsheet with all the standalone miniature keyboards I could find, in the hope that one or more of them might be viable for cannibalising into an EOMA-68 subnotebook/PDA case, at least for an early prototype.
I don't currently know a good way to collaboratively edit spreadsheets using only free software. (Maybe use something like PySpread and put it in a Git repo? Or sign up to MyKolab? Anyhow, that's getting off topic...) So, I used Google Docs. Blech. Anyhow, you can access the sheet as a CSV file without having to run any JavaScript, let alone proprietary JavaScript:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PD_tAIW7cuiXEe97BrcIRBfF9Sbo07limynx...
If you want to view the sheet in your browser, then you can do that here, but this requires running proprietary JavaScript which, obviously, I don't recommend:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PD_tAIW7cuiXEe97BrcIRBfF9Sbo07limynx...
One striking thing about the current market for *miniature* standalone keyboards is that there's only *one* USB device I could find for sale: the CarTFT MiniKey. The others use Bluetooth or proprietary 2.4GHz radio for communicating with the host computer, and use USB only for charging a battery.
2.4GHz is often implemented with very poor security (see Samy Kamkar et al), and some Bluetooth keyboards have, at least in the past, also been prone to keysniffing and keystroke injection. Maybe that has improved since people like Mike Ossmann started alerting people to Bluetooth vulnerabilities, but suffice it to say that I have no interest in using a wireless keyboard.
Sadly, the USB keyboard (the CarTFT MiniKey) doesn't look very user-friendly. It appears to have squishy keys, which in my experience give poor tactile feedback; and it lacks Esc, Ctrl, Alt and Tab keys, making it useless for Vim, Emacs, Bash, etc.
I don't know how viable it is to convert one of the more fully-featured keyboards from wireless to USB (cabled) operation.
***Questions for the list:***
- Are you aware of anyone having successfully converted a miniature wireless keyboard into a wired USB keyboard?
- Do you know of any existing designs for miniature USB keyboards that are partly or completely Free Cultural Works (e.g. that provide KiCAD and/or OpenSCAD files under a GPL license)?
Please post links/info if so.
***
Thanks!