Happy Hacking Keyboard
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
I like small things. Found a small keyboard with mechanical switches. The Happy Hacking Pro 2 With the added benefit of having the control key in a useful place! :—) Or maybe I’m just being nostalgic for my old Sun keyboard…? Anyone ever try one of these on RISC OS? |
Rick Murray (539) 13425 posts |
Hmmm… You do realise that the keyboard costs $220, that it has US layout with 2/@, that it may likely cost around $60 to ship it to Europe (assuming you live in Europe that is), and that the company offers no warranty for international orders (claiming international shipping is ‘a courtesy’). It’s a nice looking keyboard otherwise… ;-) |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
Yeah that is one of the sticky issues – I do own another mechanical keyboard that I use at work which cost something like £100 and my Thinkpad bluetooth that I use for our HTPC keyboard cost £60 so I don’t think its an outlandish sum although I admit both of those keyboards were bought before I had started a family! I spend a lot of my life behind a keyboard and for me investing in a good one is money well spent. The American layout is only a minor issue since I touch-type and rarely look at the keys so could easily re-map it. It can’t be any worse than my wife’s Mac keyboard which is some kind of weird American/ISO hybrid. So all those issues aside…I definitely wouldn’t buy one if it didn’t work with RISC OS! I seem to remember reading somewhere that it identifies itself as a “Sun Type 3” keyboard so I guess if a Sun keyboard works with RISC OS then this will….although now I’ve written that I’m wondering if I should be heading to eBay to buy a Sun keyboard and do a bit of tinkering… (I am resisting a very strong urge to buy an Ultra 5 and re-live my student days learning Emacs…) |
Christian Walther (1821) 9 posts |
IBM and Cherry appear to still sell mechanical keyboards, and the prices are comparable to the ones you mentioned above. And some “heavy hacking” friends of mine fell in love with gamer keyboards recently. Some of these keyboards have mechanical keys, too, and their built quality seems to be rather good (compared to todays standard keyboards).
Hm, come think about it I never plugged my Sun Type 7 keyboard into my RISC OS Pi. I’ll do so this evening and let you know the result.
Oh yes, one of these urges. ^^ I eventually got rid of all my old hardware because I grew tired with just fixing things, which freed up some time I can spend on RISC OS. ;) Recently a colleague offered me a Sparcstation which might be compatible with the NextStep 3.3 for Sparc install CD I still have lying around somewhere. Yes, it was a very strong urge, and no, I couldn’t resist it. ;) |
Rick Murray (539) 13425 posts |
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/4/topics/1194 It seems to me that the more bells and whistles a keyboard has, the less compatible it is. Notice that the keyboard in the original post has drivers for different machines, and the keyboard behaves differently (like play/pause/etc work on a Mac but apparently not on Windows?). |
Rick Murray (539) 13425 posts |
You know – it is a shame nobody has made a widget that can plug into a Beeb keyboard and convert it to work as a USB keyboard. It might need some work-arounds (no Alt key, for instance) but it ought to offer a keyboard experience far superior to the tactile-pad keyboards of nowadays. On the plus side, even though I’m using a dirt cheap generic keyboard, it isn’t as awful as the A310’s “circle of tin foil glued to a piece of sponge”… |
Chris Evans (457) 1614 posts |
I know someone doing a project that might make that possible:-) |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7957 posts |
Fixed a few those in the past. Bugs in software people can understand, a bug in the keyboard leaves people puzzled until you show them the squashed six legged beastie. |
Richard Walker (2090) 416 posts |
Rick, I guess a terrible solution might be to take a normal cheapo USB keyboard and transplant its USB hardware into a Beeb? I think an Archimedes keyboard might be quite cute on a Pi – I wonder if there are any with the function key strip holder intact?! :) |
Michael Emerton (483) 136 posts | |
David Boddie (1934) 222 posts |
Ugh, there’s no excuse for creating Frankenbeebs just for hipster use. There are much more interesting things to do with old hardware. |