Talk:Keyboard design

Keyboard Back-light and Illumination

It seems to me that this laptop might need to work sometimes in low lighting. It would be good to possibly turn on a back-light under the keyboard. It sounds easy to have translucent rubber so the light shows through to help see keys. --imajeff 2006-04-10

Or possibly another idea for enabling users to type in the dark would be to have a on-screen guide, showing the actual keyboard layouts that they are typing on. This is all aimed at getting the users who may not have access to extensive lighting and electricity at home up-to-speed with using the keyboard layout as quickly possible, even if this is at home in the late evening.

(section as suggested in http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/User_talk:Imajeff even though the section above on Keyboard Back-light was noticed after that suggestion was made. The thing is, I thought that "Illuminating the keyboard" is a good idea, yet I thought that it meant a light onto the keys rather than a light under translucent keys, which is also a good idea.)

Our current plan is to have a light in the bezel that can illuminate the keyboard. Walter 21:13, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

Keyboard layouts and requirements of keys

Currently, there are keyboard layouts in Xorg that require a right Alt key (the AltGr one). These keyboard layouts define characters when you press AltGr and a letter. With only one Alt key this would need some rethinking.

In addition, Xorg (XKB) allows to use a Compose key (Multi Key) to enter special characters. If you use GNOME, enable the Compose key in order to write extra Unicode characters. Usually, users set the Win key to be this Compose key. On the OLPC, will there be a spare key that can have the role of the Compose key?

With the compose key you can create universal keyboard sequences and type interesting characters such as ☗☻☎☪♜⚈⚉⚖⚄⚅♥♦♣☻☭☬. For example, you can make a sequence that the child types Compose : - ) and gets ☻. It's much better than using bitmap images. --Simosx 15:08, 10 July 2006 (EDT)

Alternate keyboarding

To leave off the standard keyboard for the first version would be foolish but...

At present, on either side of the monitor are two dual-axis controllers (joysticks). I believe that there are some buttons on the back as well. Essentially, two joysticks with four buttons (this configuration is similar to a certain popular game controller).

If the two joysticks had some directional feedback; then each of them could act as an eight valued selector. 8 * 8 = 64 combinations/changes (think the I-Ching trigrams/hexigrams). Using one of the buttons as a mode selector, another button could be recruited as shift key and another as a number key. This covers the standard 256 character ascii set very handily. This technique has appeared in some products (http://www.keybowl.com/kb/index?page=home).

If this alternate character entry mechanism were to become popular, think about how much simpler (i.e. more reliable) the hardware becomes.

• no hinge or at least one that doesn't contain electronics
• no keyboard with its many modes of failure

In the meantime, the additional way to generate characters would be a fall-back should the keyboard fail.

Why do I think this might work? Children are not pretaught to type on a keyboard. Children are already familiar with game controllers (especially if the game makers could be convinced to use the same encoding).