Keyboard Builders' Digest / Inspiration
Rotary keyboard
Squidgeefish hacked a rotary dial into a mechanical keyboard, replacing the numpad.
Published December 28, 2022
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Chad pointed me to this project committed by Squidgeefish earlier this year – a project which was meant to be an April Fool's prank: a mechanical keyboard with a rotary dial instead of a numpad.
I have a coworker who is fond of reminiscing about the good ol’ days, when his grandparents had a rotary dial phone on the wall that they were renting from the phone company. Combine this with his devotion to the tenkey pad on a full-size keyboard and the fact that I happened to have an old rotary dial in my bin of spare parts, and the path forward for this year’s April Fool’s prank was self-evident – Squidgeefish.
The keyboard features a custom 10u keycap spanning across the whole number row and made via the OpenSCAD parametric keycap generator by rsheldiii. Hiding/eliminating all the number keys, its legend states:
the rotary dial is mightier than the number keys
In fact, pressing the 10u key types out exactly this phrase instead of numbers, leaving you with the rotary dial to enter numeric values.
Read the full build log here.
Published on Wed 28th Dec 2022. Featured in KBD #109 (source).
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