Jake Herringbone

USB keyboard scancode conversion adapter

The world of Dvorak today kind of sucks. The major suck points for me are:

• Bugs in OS support for switching layouts. In Mac at least, option-’ gives me æ and option-[ gives me ” because it’s modifying the QWERTY position character. Locking my screen with LockTight, I tell it my shortcut is shift-option-command-P, but I really have to hit L.
• Software that reads scancodes in some situations where it shouldn’t. Especially as a developer, I run across tools that don’t use the OS-provided character mapping.
• Pair programming – I would like to have a Dvorak keyboard, plugin to a qwerty co-workers machine, and both keyboards work at the same time.
• Sitting down at a QWERTY keyboard. People make fun of us when we can’t use their keyboard, but honestly, it’s really annoying. I’d like to have dvorak with me all the time.
• Working through remote X sessions, VMWare, over Synergy, or in the BIOS or bootloader – you can never be sure if you have us->dvorak mapped, or if it’s mapped twice. Especially when using more than one of those remote means.
• Really low-tech people are put off from trying dvorak by the prospect of changing a setting in their OS/windowing toolkit

There is a good solution, and dvorak and other alternative layouts would really benefit if we could find someone who has the ability and desire to do this:

Make a keychain-form-factor adapter, with a male and female USB-A connector, that converts and propagates USB-keyboard scancodes.
I think this just requires a USB keyboard controller and USB keyboard host controller chip (with accompanying capacitors and what-not and what-have-you) and an EEPROM or similar with a mapping programmed in. And a hacked-up enclosure.

3 Comments to USB keyboard scancode conversion adapter

Gabe
January 14, 2009

Hardware projects sound like fun. I want to help.

lele
September 5, 2009

They already make such a device (kinda pricey, though):

http://www.keyghost.com/qido/

OTOH, your project would be most interesting to those who use different layouts, for example the Colemak crowd:

http://forum.colemak.com/index.php

Cheers

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