Typing on Air

Touchscreens, voice assistants, and gesture recognition systems may be among the most popular types of user interfaces for mobile electronic devices, but they cannot compete with the good old keyboard in terms of data entry speed. When you have a lengthy email to compose, a spreadsheet to update, or a couple hundred lines of code to write, nothing other than a keyboard is going to cut it. So when working with smaller mobile devices, like smartphones and smartwatches, where it does not make sense to lug around a keyboard, working on tasks such as these is quite impractical.

It is a shame to be limited by something so simple as a lack of a decent input device. Given that a lot of phones have as much computing power as a laptop, they could otherwise easily be used to handle just about anything we can throw at them while we are on the go. But how can this problem be solved? Almost certainly not by a big and bulky wearable keyboard, but hey… you never know until you try it, right? Adam LeBlanc wanted to see if something practical matching this description could be developed, and built a wrist-mounted keyboard prototype to find out.

The keyboard, called Schist01, attaches around the forearm and extends to cover the hand. An ergonomically-shaped panel in front of the hand is equipped with keyboard keys that are within reach of the fingers at all times. A small trackpad sits within reach of the thumb to allow for mousing while using the Schist01. To make the system portable, it is battery powered and connects to other devices wirelessly.

The body of the keyboard was 3D-printed in PLA, and the 3D model for the print was crafted after making molds with Plasticine clay. A Typeractive nice!nano development board — which was designed with building custom keyboards in mind — processes key presses and manages wireless communication with a host device, which sees the Schist01 as a standard keyboard. Kailh switches and keycaps were used as the keyboard keys. The well-known ZMK firmware was utilized to easily turn the development board into a wireless keyboard.

When all was said and done, LeBlanc found the Schist01 to be heavy, awkward to use, and lacking in battery life. It is definitely not something that LeBlanc is ready to use on a regular basis, let alone the typical user of a mobile device. But through the lengthy build process, many lessons were learned, and LeBlanc is not giving up on the idea just yet. With some refinements, it should be possible to make the keyboard less cumbersome to use. Maybe with enough work it will even be a nice input device to work with. Mainstream use may still be a bridge too far, but perhaps specialized use cases, like virtual reality, could benefit from a refined version of Schist01.