Clackups' Half-QWERTY Keyboard Aims to be a Low-Cost Input Device for War-Injured in Ukraine
Built around the QMK firmware and a 40% PCB, this keyboard delivers a twist on a design from 1993 originally targeting palmtops.
Pseudonymous maker "clackups" is working on an easy-to-build affordable keyboard for one-handed typing — with a particular interest in assisting those injured in the ongoing war in Ukraine.
"The goal of the project is to build an inexpensive keyboard for one-handed users, mainly targeting Ukrainians injured in the war," clackups explains. "The design is based on the publication of Edgar Matias, utilising the CSTC40 keyboard by KPrepublic. The layout is still a work in progress, so suggestions are very much welcome."
Matias' work in question, published along with colleagues I. Scott MacKenzie and William Buxton in the Proceedings of the INTERCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 1993, details a design for a one-handed keyboard dubbed "half-QWERTY" — based on the idea of a mirror layout and originally intended for use with the palmtop computers that were all the rage at the time. "A Half-QWERTY keyboard is comprised of all the keys typed by one hand, with the keys of the other hand unused or absent," the researchers explained.
"When the space bar is depressed, the missing characters are mapped onto the remaining keys in a mirror image, such that the typing hand makes movements homologous to those previously performed by the other hand. Thus, using the space bar as a modifier, a typist can generate the characters of either side of a full-sized keyboard using only one hand."
The design by clackups takes the concept in a slightly different direction than its originators had initially intended: instead of building a custom keyboard with fewer keys than normal, the maker has based their work on an existing off-the-shelf 40% layout dubbed the CSTC40. The center of the keyboard is used as a Half-QWERTY layout, with the left-hand side being used as a number pad and the right-hand side for navigation. As an added bonus, the keyboard's firmware includes a mouse emulation mode — allowing the user to control the pointer without having to remove their hand from the keyboard.
Clackups has released more information, and the firmware source code, on GitHub, and is actively soliciting feedback on the layout. More details are available in the maker's Mastodon thread.