The keyboard. The finger keys are along the right side.
Another plastic fruit-based peripheral.
I'm not sure where the idea for this one came from. I'd always wanted a chording keyboard, but I'd never felt like rustling up $200 for such a simple-seeming device. I decided to roll my own.
I chose a plastic apple because it seemed to be a comfortable shape to hold in the hand. It had the side benefit of being somewhat translucent, so the indicator LEDs seem to sparkle merrily within.
I lost all the microcode for the keyboard in my drive crash. In its last iteration, the keyboard supported alphanumerics and basic punctuation keycodes. It doesn't currently support uppercase, and unless I get around to writing the code, it's not likely to. In any event, if I put more time into this, I'm likely to go with a new design, preferrably one that supports USB (this iteration is built around an 18-pin SX microcontroller and the usual PS/2 keyboard connector).
Some pictures:
The keyboard. The finger keys are along the right side.
Reverse shot, showing the two thumb switches.
Head-on view.
The guts. You can see the translucency here. The SX is on
the small protoboard in the middle; the large black mass on the lower
right is the programming interface; the LEDs are dangling towards the top.