The mechanical keyboard group is a vibrant, if not fanatical, group of lovers decided to search out as many attainable methods of assembling, constructing, and utilizing as many high-quality keyboards as attainable. With so many devoted contributors, most issues that may be finished with a keyboard have already got been finished. So when one thing as distinctive as this break up keyboard that additionally doubles as a mouse pops up, we take discover.

The keyboard is a customized construct from [Taliyah Huang] which makes use of a pair of Arduinos, one in every half of the keyboard, to speak key and mouse info to a 3rd Arduino which is plugged in to her laptop computer. The proper-hand half of the keyboard additionally contains the circuitry from an optical mouse, which will get powered up when the caps lock button is held down. When activated, this enables the keyboard for use as a mouse straight. It additionally contains assist for many Mac gestures as effectively, making it simply as helpful as a trackpad.

Whereas there have been some issues with the design, together with being barely too tall to be ergonomic and taking almost 24 hours of soldering to finish, the prototype system is an attention-grabbing one particularly because it permits for full management of a pc with no need a devoted mouse. For different distinctive mechanical keyboard ideas, we lately featured this construct which takes design and performance cues from the Commodore 64.