Micks Distractions

Well, I’ve built the first pro­to­type of the board, and coded up rev 1.0 of the key­board soft­ware.

Rev 1.0 sup­ports the usual key­bounce rou­tines, and braille decoder. It’ll take a bit of tweak­ing to find the opti­mum bal­ance of key­bounce vs proper oper­a­tion. I’m think­ing of sup­port­ing dynamic key­stroke detec­tion so that as some­one gets bet­ter at typ­ing, it’ll shorten the delay between the key­bounce rou­tine and a valid key­stroke. This means as you get faster typ­ing, it won’t slow you down.
I’ve set the the­o­ret­i­cal max­i­mum limit to dou­ble the speed of the cur­rent world record, (150wpm or 12 cps). Now that shouldn’t be an issue!

First up: This has been dis­cussed to death on forums and mail groups for a long time. The win­ner is that there isn’t one. The basic truth is that either will do for you a good job. How­ever, I found sub­tle dif­fer­ences between the two that made me end up going with Atmel. Here’s why:
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While I was wait­ing for the PIC bits to arrive I started fool­ing around with the phys­i­cal look of the MICK braille key­board.
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Mick’s Inte­grated Chordic Keyboard

First up. Why?
Well, the answer is that I’m get­ting tired of using the stan­dard qwerty key­board. Even though I can type fairly fast, I am not a touch typ­ist, and only use 6 fin­gers any­way. With those 6 fin­gers I can get to 100wpm, but I have to look at the key­board for fin­ger placement.

What would be nice is to have a key­board that I could take with me any­where. Some­thing I can put in my pocket, can con­nect to my Nokia phone via Blue­tooth, or my iPAQ via blue­tooth, IR or ser­ial. Then there’s my 12 odd PCs at home, and not to men­tion work. Some­thing with a small screen would be nice so as to eas­ily learn the new fin­ger place­ment. Some­thing that can last at least a week on bat­ter­ies. Mmmm.
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I finally got my PIC chips, pro­gram­mer, and dev board. Started to hack around with the PICs. It dawned on me very quickly, that the re-learning curve will be steep. Also, that the PICs turned out, (for me), to be the wrong choice. See here for a rea­son why I ditched them.
So, after a bit more dig­ging, I went with the Atmels. These are pretty decent chips, and I cer­tainly feel more at home with them.

I’ve ordered all the bits for the project. I ended up bas­ing it on the 16F88 PIC chip. Nice lit­tle unit that can be pro­grammed in-circuit via a boot­loader.
In the mean time I started to muck around with hard­ware mod­els of the fin­ished prod­uct. I shelved all the mod­els until I have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how the pro­to­type will go.
Three dif­fer­ent designs:
A form fit­ting sep­a­rate handed model.

Dual handed model.

Sim­pler design — the one I’ll even­tu­ally stick with.