Last night, just as I was about to go to bed, Jesse tweeted:| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Lately, I've been porting Kaleidoscope to keyboards that happened to land on my desk for one reason or the other. Keyboards such as the ErgoDox EZ, the Atreus, Splitography, and most recently, KBD4x. In almost every case, I ran into weird issues I couldn't immediately explain, where the symptoms weren't search-engine friendly. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with the ported code, either, because the same code worked on another board. Figuring out what went wrong and where was an incredi...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I wrote a progress report, yet, there's so much to share! Many, many things happened in the 18 months since the last update, some good, some bad. This report will not be a completely accurate and through account of those months, but rather a summary. Lets start with the most glaring fact: Chrysalis is still not ready for a beta. But it is closer than ever was before.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I wrote about what's happening with Kaleidoscope, and I've been putting off writing this post for so long, that I can't ignore it anymore. I've been putting it off because a lot of things happened, and many more are under development. It's a huge amount of work, even to summarize. Fortunately, there's a lot of good stories to tell.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Patreon recently announced that they will restructure their fees, but they are doing so in such a way that hurts me, and hurts my patrons. For a $1 contribution, they'd charge $1.35, and each contribution would be charged individually, instead of one bulk charge at the start of the month. This makes small contributions very expensive, especially when one does many small contributions.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have changed jobs recently, for a whole lot of reasons I'm not going to ramble about publicly, except one of them: I wanted to spend more time hacking on keyboard firmware, Kaleidoscope in particular. I had a huge backlog - still do, but less so -, and many, many things that needed to be done, as soon as possible. Not to mention I enjoy working on it, so I made arrangements in order to be able to do so.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
On the 20th of August, shortly after posting the previous post on this blog, we went to the hospital for a routine check up. As we were expecting any day now, we went with everything packed, and how good we did so! As usual, I was waiting outside while my wife went in, but five minutes later, she walks out, and says the most beautiful words I ever heard until that day: "We are staying". The next half an hour was spent notifying family, and a few hours later - shortly after half past eleven - ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have worked with embedded hardware before, a long, long time ago, near the turn of the century. But it was a brief exposure to this world, and even back then, I was using hardware much more powerful than what the keyboards I work with today have, the Atmega32u4. My prior experience did not prove all that useful in my recent work. There were lots of assumptions I made that were flat out wrong, lots of surprising things I had to discover. Some of these things are obvious in hindsight, some I ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Writing this post is completely unplanned, there was no development I planned to write about today, but this morning, I sat down to attempt implementing a request made on GitHub, to explore how hard it would be. It was meant to be a quick experiment, with only some data and talking points as a result. It ended up becoming something a lot more than that, and of the whole ordeal the biggest take away for me is that we managed to cut the length of a scan cycle in half again. We are down from abo...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It has been a while I wrote about keyboards - or anything at all, really -, so it is high time I do that, because there has been a lot of progress made on various fronts. We will touch a number of topics today, ranging from Kaleidoscope to QMK related ones. As a teaser, we will talk about hid-io, feedback from the Keyboardio PVT run so far, and Emacs.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The past few weeks were quite a challenge, but we are slowly settling down at our new place (where I now have a proper desk, with enough space for all the gadgets, whee!), and Chrysalis has been moving forward nicely too, with some major changes all around the place. While you can see some of those changes in the video below (just compare it to the previous one!), a lot of the changes were made under the hood, and can't be seen. I'll be going into more details, but first, lets see how things ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The past month has been eventful in many ways: we've seen the Twins three times on ultra sound, made huge progress towards moving to a bigger apartment, and last but not least, tremendous progress was made on Chrysalis. It even has useful features now, so much so, that an alpha release was tagged too. You can see a demo video just below, and try the pre-built binaries yourself, no Kaleidoscope-powered hardware required, either!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
As promised last time, I will be sharing Kaleidoscope-related developments more often, and as it happens, there are interesting news to share today!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
You know that feeling when everything seems to fall into place? When you finally reach the top of the hill, and look around? When everything you worked towards bears fruit? When you lay back, and prepare to rest, to enjoy the hard work put into your creation?| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Last time I talked about firmware stuff, I mentioned that there's a new package coming my way. Well, it arrived, and that set the course for the next week or two at least. And things unfolded rapidly. We've implemented some very important pieces of the puzzle, solved problems we have not noticed before, and I created plugins I was commissioned to write. All in all, the past two weeks were eventful, and easily the busiest and almost the most productive part of my firmware work so far.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
So I had the Keyboardio Model 01 prototype for over a month now, and a lot has happened since the last progress report, ranging from having a colleague re-solder some of the problematic parts of the keyboard, through fixing a lot of bugs in the plugins, to Unleashing the Horde.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A day before Christmas, I received a package, in which was a prototype of the Keyboardio Model 01, for the purpose of testing, and fixing the plugins I'm developing for its firmware. And to work on the firmware too, as a side-effect.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
This past week I have been waiting for a package. Not just any random package, mind you: this one came from the US, and was special in a number of ways. The eagerness to have it in my hands was huge, so huge that I started to plot its route on a map, trying to estimate where it will land next, when, and where it will go after. This was a reasonable success, but once the package arrived to Hungary, the excitement increased by a tenfold.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have been playing with an UHK prototype lately, obviously not on any of the hardware bits, but on the firmware. It's an interesting thing, poking around in the brain of a keyboard, especially when its the third, very different kind of brain.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the first time, I will be talking about the keyboard.io only. No ADORE or ErgoDox news to report this time, and I'm typing this on Dvorak too (a tad tired and short on time to write on ADORE). And gosh, there is so much to talk about! Remember the last time? So much has changed. Nothing is quite the same, really. The old multi-key library is now laying dormant and abandoned, but a new one arose, and was claiming attention. It started as a full-blown firmware, but I was quickly persuaded t...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The layout I use, and the one I'm aiming for are rather unconventional in a few respects. One of these is that I make heavy use of various multi-purpose keys: one-shot modifiers, tap-dance-, and leader keys. I have read, and continue reading a lot of keyboard and layout-related material. Blog posts, researches, theorycrafting about the most efficient layout, and a lot more. And reading most, I often feel frustrated, because almost all of them are written with the same old keyboard design and ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Just like last time, the focus of this post is keyboard.io and ADORE. There are plenty of news to report on both sides! A lot of progress has been made on the arduino front, to make it possible to have the behaviour I desire on the Model 01 - only the Leader key is missing, and I have a good idea about its implementation, too. On the other front, ADORE has seen a huge update again, aimed at reducing pinky use, and balancing the hands out. We'll see after this post how that worked in practice.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Today I will write more about layouts and the keyboard.io than the ErgoDox, though most of the testing has been made on it. This time, I took a big step: having procrastinated on it for a very long time, I rearranged the number row, along with the symbols. To make the transition easier - for some values of easy - I started to use the same number/symbol layout on my base layer too. What can I say? It's painful. I have used the same layout ever since I first laid my hands on a keyboard in the e...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
As with the last blog post, I'm writing this on ADORE, to collect another heatmap worth of data. It is still awfully slow, but the changes I made since the last time feel better so far. Nevertheless, this post will be as much about other things, as about ADORE. This marks the day I start tagging these posts with the new Ergonomics tag.| asylum.madhouse-project.org