Joe Scotto's Inspired by the Long-Lost Frogpad One-Handed Keyboard for the 3D-Printable ScottoFrog

Custom keyboard enthusiast Joe Scotto has released a new build, designed to fill the gap in the market left by the discontinuance of the Frogpad one-handed keyboard: the ScottoFrog.

"Roughly six months ago I was commissioned to build something similar to the discontinued Frogpad," Scotto explains of his latest creation. "The board is a full keyboard for single-handed use and I added Bluetooth capability with a nice!nano [microcontroller]. It's called the ScottoFrog."

The original Frogpad launched as a device for one-handed text entry on mobile phones, using a novel layout which allows for the most common letters to be entered with only one finger and the remainder with a chord of just two. Since its discontinuation, two crowdfunding campaigns have been launched to create spiritual successors — one of which was cancelled with full refunds in 2012, and the other of which failed to deliver hardware to its backers in 2014.

The ScottoFrog, then, aims to fill a hole — and, like Scotto's other keyboard designs, is released as open hardware, meaning Frogpad fans left bereft now have a way to make their own at a very low cost using 3D-printed keycaps and casings and a cheap nice!nano Bluetooth-capable microcontroller. There isn't even a need to have PCBs made: the ScottoFrog's components are all wired together by hand.

"I personally don't have a use for a single-handed keyboard but the 20-key layout was perfect to convert it into a gaming macropad," Scotto writes of the board. "I 3D-printed the case and keycaps with a matte filament and used the fuzzy skin setting in Cura which I think makes it look like concrete."

The ScottoFrog is available under a reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license on Scotto's GitHub repository, along with every other hand-wired keyboard he has designed so far; more information is available on Scotto's Reddit post.