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Onehand – a one-handed keyboard

u/SouthPawEngineer's Onehand is a creatively named accessible keyboard with five-way switches.

KBD.news
Published January 21, 2022
Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 140K readers.

This is a concept for a one handed keyboard by SouthPawEngineer using 5-way switches "to greatly expand the number of switch functions quickly accessible to a single finger".

I've seen some focus lately on small onehanded keyboards that have a focus on chording. This particular design still does, but to a very minor extent in comparison. The keymap thus far is mostly designed to be familiar to users of QWERTY – SouthPawEngineer.

The keymap, while it is subject to change, is pretty straightforward. The top row is the primary hand, and the second row is the opposite hand. In general, up is the top row, right is the middle row, down is the third row, and left is numbers on the base layer. This arrangement makes using the board quite intuitive for those coming from QWERTY.

The keycaps increase the lever arm of the small 5-way switches so you can control the force needed to actuate in the cardinal directions by changing the height of the keycap – at the expense of key travel.

I have seen a number of folks on this forum and others like it who have injured a hand and asked for help with one handed designs or layouts. There are quite a few out there, but something like this might be able to help those people who either don't have use of both hands, or have injured themselves in some way such that they temporarily don't have proper use of one hand or the other. While a design more focused on chording may able to achieve higher WPM, this design should be able strike a balance between a complicated chording interface that can achieve high WPM and a more intuitive and more familiar way of inputting text.

Shown is the left hand variant, but one of the variants has a flippable PCB so that either hand may be used.

The board features an NRF52840 module running ZMK firmware. As such, both USB and Bluetooth may be used. By default, the small function keys on the right side are used for Bluetooth configuration and profile switching.

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Published on Fri 21st Jan 2022. Featured in KBD #62 (source).


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