here is the thing though. I can buy a 10$ board like a arduino pro micro or a rpi 2040. Cut out or 3d print a switch plate for whatever switch i want to use and then handwire the matrix, flash qmk/zmk on the board and I have a keyboard for FAR less than 6$ a key. Wiring that matrix is not rocket science, he'll it's barely harder than your typical baking recipie.
I imagine any similar hobby that is generally practiced outdoors, is not repetitive (knitting as an example), and requires acute use of your senses would be the same.
The only hilariously stupid thing is your lack of understanding. Even if this isn’t overly practical, I’m sure they learned a lot that will be applicable to further projects, and the few people this is practical for benefit. OP shared a cool thing they did. You don’t have to like the thing they did. You, however, don’t have a leg to stand on if you cannot articulate constructive criticism and just call it “stupid”.
I'm the one with the criticism. You should argue with me, not those who agree with my criticism.
This project is so bad, anyone with basic physics and electronics understanding can tell it's bad. Unlike @sleepybrett I never even built a keyboard in my life and yet can I still find numerous problems with that keyboard. And I didn't even get to the MCU firmware part. I can only imagine how bad that is.
If this project was done only to learn, then why is it here? People don't usually brag about what they learn. (Look ma! I put 3 lego bricks together.) I mean, it's perfectly OK to build projects to learn, make mistakes and learn from those too - I wish I had time to do that myself - but showing it on HN as if it's some viable product? Don't do that.
Why are you defending it? Just because it looks "cool"?
It’s here because OP wanted to show it (likely because they thought their project was “cool” plus wanted feedback). It was then positively voted on by the community. Like it or not, this website is a community-driven aggregator, not a curated commercial showcase. Over the course of a day I easily ignore 90% of the articles here, and consider most of them some form of “stupid” or “bad”. Unlike real life, ignoring the things you dislike here really lets them go away.
Let me remind you that you literally opened up with various constructive criticisms, providing value to OP and to others reading. That alone made the OP’s post worth it. Nobody made any claims that it was a product btw, you made that assumption yourself. OP could have—and should have—explained what they were aiming for here, but “Show HN” is literally for things people make, just because some people use it as free advertising doesn’t mean hacking away at personal projects is wrong, in fact it’s the opposite.
As for why I’m defending it? Because I want to, it’s that simple. I don’t need a complex explanation to defend it or myself, particularly when I made my thoughts clear earlier. What about you? Why do you feel the need to shield sleepybrett from criticism while he’s posturing over making a simple keyboard? Why do you feel the need to tear this project down over aspects you haven’t even looked at?
> Why do you feel the need to tear this project down over aspects you haven’t even looked at?
Because it looks to me like some sort of hype product launch / vaporware / investor bait / star farming, or some other foul play, and everyone here gave votes and supportive comments instead of realizing just how bad it must be in reality.
https://imgur.com/a/LjUajeX it might have some areas of improvement but it works lol (I also updated the readme to show the video). I got a lot of helpful feedback for the next revision (includes your original comment) and that was kind of the main reason for posting this so thank you for that!
I've built a dozen plus keyboards in various configurations. I don't lack understanding, i have better understanding that you do apparently. I can build any keyboard i want with switches, a bag of diodes, a spool of wire and just about any commodity dev board like a rp2040 that qmk/zmk can support, add a 3d printer or a friend with a 3d printer it's a viable keyboard. Hell not even a 3d printer, i've seen guys who've built switch plates and cases with a dremel or basic woodworking tools.
For reference, my heuristic for circuit price estimation is
- passives and little SMT things are free
- anything electromechanical ~$1: switches, connectors, in this case the pogo pins
- fancy connectors up to $10 (ZIF sockets, RAM sockets, etc)
- normal ICs $1
- BGA or fancier ICs: check digikey or guess $10-$100
- board area is "free" for small boards (up to hand-sized)
Is that for a certain order size? Because a lot of the cost can come simply from retooling or swapping components. Like if you have 100 x1 smt components vs 1x 100 smt components it's a huge different if you get what I mean. Also anything through hole I basically just give up getting assembled as a hobbyist.
you know what a spool of wire, a reel of diodes, a peice of plasticcard and a hobby knife (for a switch plate, assuming you don't have access to a 3d printer or laser cutter), and a rp2040 costs? Because that's all you need (aside switches) to build any size/geometry of keyboard you want.
These per switch pcbs are conceptually cool but just kinda stupid, there are tons of people selling these single switch pcbs without the magnets/pogopins out there.. people try them out and then decide that they are pointless.
Pogo pins are expensive. Somewhere around $0.15-$1 per pin. This design has four pairs of two pins. So just the connectors are over a dollar per key, possibly multiple dollars
Inductive coupling could work for both power and data, but probably not at high enough power levels to have LEDs per key if you want to go through 10+ keys in a row...
I picked up a steam frame because I'm sucker for headsets that don't smell like zuckerberg. (and it's at least 2x cheaper than the vision pro)
While I enjoy some of the VR games I've played, mostly simulator types (star wars squadrons, elite dangerous), as well as the 'exercise style' (beat saber, pistol whip), and this kind of 'board game style' (moss, ... there is a d&d one i don't recall the name of). I'm actually very keen on attempting productivity in the glasses.
The frame is easily the lightest, or at least, the most manageable headset I've tried and the most comfortable long term.
Coming from the Index the screen resolution is much better and in my testing last night (It just showed up on my doorstep monday) it was working out pretty well in just the packed in 'desktop' mode (just one 'virtual monitor'). Paired a BT keyboard, installed goland and several other tools and was able to comfortably read all the windows without even tweaking things like themes, font-sizes, etc. All running directly on the headset.
I've seen some addon's that tweak the desktop environment, noteably frametop (https://github.com/Frametop/frametop) which i'm keen on trying out. Apparently it also allows you to set up remote 'monitors' as additional 'screens' in environment, it seems like it should support pulling my macbook screen into it via VNC.
I guess all to say I'm excited to explore what a 'vr native' productivity environment could look like beyond what i'm getting now, which is essentially virtual monitors.
I set up frametop yesterday night, some bumps along the way for sure. Paired my kinesis360pro and had to set it through passthrough to get any of the frametop hotkeys to work (took me a bit to figure that out). I put a cheapo bluetooth mouse in my amazon cart so I'll be able to try that out (i'm a wired mouse guy)...
Just need to find a few more tools to make my development environment a bit more ergonomic (need to find a terminal that supports remote tmux as well as iterm2), but so far it's working out great.
But again, frametop feels like a 1.0.. I think what I want or what would help is a vr native windows manager with features akin to macos' "stage manager" and other windows management features that they've built out... I dunno, maybe it's time to see if i can't vibe code my way to some prototypes.
I was also looking at this the other day, https://github.com/Saffsanity/sill might be cool to write a client on the frame side to recieve these windows/screens. The frametop remote screen thing seems like it doesn't support vnc which is a little annoying.
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