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Odd Inputs winners
Hackaday' Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest is over. Check out the winners.
Published July 17, 2022
The Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest on Hackaday is over, the winners had to be chosen from 75 entries.
While this wasn't a competition exclusively for keyboards, two categories covered something like keyboards and macropads so there are some projects worth checking out.
Accordingly, you can find non-keyboard related projects among the winners, and – blasphemy – sometimes they are more interesting than recreating or simply reposting the same idea which has been around for years.
Some interesting choices in Hackaday's top list, but anyway, here are the winners chosen by the judges (followed by some notable runner-ups):
Winners
Keybon is a macropad with an OLED screen per key – similar to thpoll's Poly Keyboard. It talks to an application running on your computer that reports the program in focus, and adapts the keymap and the OLED labels accordingly.
An odd choice imo: Cree-board with beefy COB LEDs as keycaps. Matt allegedly got the idea from the bad pun in the name.
Finally, Josh EJ turned an exercise bike into an input device. The ESP32-based Bluetooth "gamepad" registers the speed, and the heart-rate pads are also repurposed as buttons.
Notable runner-ups
[https://hackaday.io/project/160704-dichotomy-keyboard-and-mouse|Dichotomy]] is a pretty old project from [[https://imgur.com/a/GWvwg|2017]. It combines the functions of a mouse and keyboard into one device to minimize changes between the two devices. Yep, there's an optical sensor and LED reflector/lens in the right half so you move it like a mouse.
And we have some familiar projects like Peter Lyons' Squeezebox (I still dig the idea of double home rows), or the PicoSplit and Badger 2040 by Andreas Känner.
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Did you miss this competition? If you have a great idea or keyboard in the making, there's another competition by Seeed – with free prototyping and a prize pool worth of $1000.
Published on Sun 17th Jul 2022. Featured in KBD #87 (source).
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