I designed a keyboard for my phone. Ask me anything :)

I've been posting this on a few places over the last 1.5 years. Basically where ever I currently am when the thought crosses my mind ;)

I posted it on Beehaw a few weeks ago.

It doesn't have to be. I actually use a custom onscreen keyboard that just shows special characters that aren't on the keyboard.

But you can just as easily tell the phone to hide the onscreen keyboard if the physical one is attached. Just a checkbox that needs to be toggled.

Almostˆˆ My Droid 4 died in 2016 and that sent me on a ~6 year quest to design a decent keyboard attachment for my phone.

Yeah, back in the day when you could actually still buy phones with keyboards.

I don't know why but my brain decided to bookmark this comment. I like the cutnod your jib and I wish in this moment lemmy had the KBin feature of upvotes AND boosts

I had a HTC G1, the first android phone, it had a slide out keyboard, and it was nice. The mechanism was satisfying to fidget with and it was a full 5 row keyboard with enough space you could comfortably type even in a terminal emulator. The screen was small, and the onscreen keyboard at the time sucked for autocorrect.

I'm glad the track ball, and the chin didn't stick around.

I didn't have a Droid 1, but I heard it's keyboard sucked.

I had an HTC Universal, with a keyboard that was so huge that it effectively masked how bad the keys themselves were.

I then had a Droid 3, which was much better and then a Droid 4 which was the sweet spot. I had Linux in a chroot (still do), and it was an almost desktop-like experience with the 5-row keyboard and the touchscreen acting as a trackpad. It was really good.

I tried making different side-sliding attachments, but these are always chunky, center of balance is always terrible and you need to use Bluetooth, which also sucks.

So I ended up sticking a Blackberry keyboard to my phone. I still wish I had a landscape keyboard, but this is the best I could come up with so far.

I'm not selling these, due to patent issues, supply issues and a rather awkward amount of people who would want to buy them. I've had ~100 people asking for one. If it was ~5 or so, I could just make them and give them away either at cost or for free. The amount of work and money is small enough, and support/warranty is not an issue.

If it was >20k people, I could get a production partner that would do the production for me, I could hire support staff and so on.

But with ~100 units, that's by far not enough to hire anyone, but it's still enough that I would have to deal with returns/warranty/support and that it's too much for me to actually do it on my own next to my real job.

But the design is free and open source, so if anyone wants to make them (even commercially), I'd be more than happy.

No, sadly not. Weirdly enough, it's a mental load thing. But I'd be very happy if anyone wants to make and sell these. No problem with someone else making a profit off that project.

Thanks!

If you watch some soldering tutorials (specifically for QFN packages, they have the same pin spacing). But what would make it much easier is if you find a local maker space. They are usually willing and able to help with stuff like that. Alternatively, you can get any laptop repair shop to do it for you. They can do that pretty easily and it won't cost much.

It is actually iPhone (theoretically) iPhone compatible. Just hasn't been tested.

You just need a Lightning OTG connector instead of the USB C OTG one, and you need to adjust the case to fit the iPhone.

What emoji did you use here? Can't see it on my Android ☹️

The replacement keyboard removes like 90% of the headache and the minimum order quantity.

If you want to go and make it, I'd be more than happy. I'd even be happy for someone making them and selling them, as long as my repo is mentioned somewhere.

There are still phones like that, check out the Astro Slide 5G for instance.

If Blackberry doesn't make phones any more, the community will have to fill that void.

It's a real keypad from a BB device, so I'm pretty positive they are.

Much better. I use the software keyboard when I want to type quietly or when the phone needs to charge and it's always a major main, compared to the physical keyboard.

I can type on the physical keyboard while walking and not looking at it, without making mistakes. While right now I struggle (on the software keyboard) to output anything resembling correct Englisch while lieing in my bed and looking at the phone.