Jeremy Loulou

HeIIo mundo

A message straight from Voodoo! (My L and R keys are among the incorrectly soldered, so I've had to put my linguistic skills and typography knowledge to a creative task.)

Here at last! In It's Most Beautifully Primordial Form!

On the off chance that my enthusiasm cannot be felt from the header alone, I am quite excited to say that the first Voodoo keyboard is now living! There are certainly things to be said about it, and lessons leaned from holding a "finished" version for the first time, but before all that, let us bask in the glory!

...Enough basking, on to the issues.

Problems... So Many Problems...

Aside from the fact that several keys aren't soldered properly, rendering them effectively dead, there are a few major problems with what is effectively a test bench for the firmware.

The first thing you'll notice putting your hand on it is that the joystick positioning is just wrong. I tried two angles, but in both cases they are too far from the corner of the back row for my relatively medium-sized hands. This is exacerbated by the fact that these salvaged sticks are rather tall compared to those I plan to use in future iterations.

The core mistake that I made was thinking about the keyboard's chassis in terms of the key position, rather than joystick position. Lesson 1:The joystick, and not the keys, must dictate the position of the other for it to be comfortable.

Next there are a few niggles which come from the hack-slap, spit and tape construction of the rig. Notably, the ethernet cable is stiff and makes it hard to set the halves at the angle I want. What's worst, I glued them in an inwardly-straight configuration, which makes the halves splay out when set to either side of a laptop with the cable behind the screen... bordering unusable... more than bordering, actually.

Another pestering thing, which, in a rare instance, I can say I predicted, is that the light halve move around when trying to actuate the joystick without holding onto the keyboard. This will call for either a creative solution (as part of the tenting setup) or just a super heavy baseplate (I may or may not have half-inch steel set aside). This could also be abated with lighter actuation joysticks.

Something else which I more or less anticipated is the problematic texture of the thumbsticks. Ideally, a light actuation will make it better, but the lack of grippy surface finish makes the gliding strikes of the stick which I hoped for difficult and unreliable. This will be especially relevant once I pick up speed with the layer switching.

Finally, and this may be the worst issue, second only to the joystick position: in order to simplify the prototyping, I avoided any splay or column stagger. While this is generally 90% as comfortable as it can be for the three forefingers, it is a very different story for the pinky. To type remotely comfortably now requires your hand be angled laterally to artificially "lengthen" the pinky, which makes the joystick even more poorly positioned...Lesson 2: The columns stagger is an important consideration.

Conclusion

In its current form the Voodoo is unusable at worst and a miserable experience at best. Still, the minimal hands on time I'm getting gives me some confidence about the over-all direction of the design. The concept seems as promising as ever and this primordial beast, with its copper veins and crystal heartbeat, will evolve into what I hope will be a uniquely amazing tool.

As always, you can follow the progress on the Voodoo board here. Once the core issues are resolved and the keymap is finalized it's going to get really interesting!