Over on Hacker News, there is a discussion about Atwood’s new keyboard. It looks nice, but it’s not my ultimate keyboard. So bored rich people out there, build me a better keyboard.

First, it needs to be ergonomic. Microsoft has pretty much perfected this, so let’s start by copying their natural keyboard design. The basic wave shape and key layout of the current natural keyboards is great, especially since they fixed the layout of the navigation (insert/delete) cluster. We’ll drop the stupid silver buttons across the top: they’re way too far to reach from the home row. We’ll also need to nuke the zoom thing in the center. We’re going to need that space for something else later.

After a long wait, my MakerBot Replicator 2X was finally shipped and came in. I’ve wanted a 3D printer for a long time (going back to the Cupcake days) and only this year was able to convince my wife that we “needed” one.

After much screwing around, I finally got the ST7565 working with the Arduino Due. The wonderful u8glib recently added support for the Due and had preexisting support for the ST7565.

I’ve spent the last several days unsuccessfully trying to get the ST7565 to work with the Arduino Due. I’ve been trying to port ladyada’s ST7565 library to the SAM core without much luck.

Using the ST7565 with Uno and the library works with no issues, as would be expected, so I didn’t fuck up soldering or anything easy to diagnose like that.

One of the things I knew going into this project was that I wanted the alarm clock to be compatible with Arduino. Ideally I’m going to expose as many of the Arduino’s pins on the final product in an accessible way so people can slap on shields and extend the clock to make it better.

This then begs the question: which Arduino? I have both a Uno and a Due. While I like the simplicity, support and cost of the Uno, the Due seems more future proof. My ST7575 already takes up over half the available pins on an Uno, and I haven’t even added any clocks, GPS, wakeup lights or the million or so other things this clock is going to do to it. Plus I’m sure the extra speed on the Due will come in handy. So Due it is.