So this post will serve as a gateway to the project and maybe I’ll come back and update it when I have some visualizations.
Anyway, I’m designing Type-O to meet a specific need of mine: to be able to write anywhere and eliminate the things that prevent me from doing so. I’ve tried a lot of different things, and ultimately the best has been good-old-fashioned Moleskin notebooks, but my handwriting is so much slower than my typing.
So the idea is to keep it as simple and reliable as a notebook, but with a keyboard.
A nice keyboard.
After going through multiple designs I’ve settled on a “slab” style machine akin to the TRS-80 Model 100 with an Ortholinear mechanical keyboard at the bottom and a 4x40 character LCD at the top.
The Type-O prototype will use the same keyboard I built for RAIN-PSP.
You turn it on, you type, you turn it off.
Type-O’s “interface” (it’s almost too simple to use a word like that to describe it) is journal based. Each day a new file is created automatically and when you first turn it on each day you are greeted with a blank slate. Each time you turn it on throughout the day you pick up right where you left off.
When you want to read what you have typed, you can scroll-through the text on the device, but you can also plug it into a computer’s USB port and Type-O shows up like a flash drive where you can find text files of the stuff you wrote.
While it’s connected to your computer, you can also use Type-O as a nice USB keyboard.
There is no cloud, no network no “app”. No spell-check, no grammar-check no LLM generated text. Type-O doesn’t try to be clever or do anything you don’t ask it to. It simply captures what you type and gives it back to you as text files on your computer desktop.
Of course like everything I make it is as open as possible. The firmware is written in Circuitpython so if you don’t like how it works you can change it. Design files and source code for any custom hardware will be available and all other hardware will be off-the-shelf parts. The keyboard uses standard replaceable keyswitches and caps which can be customized as well.
Cost-wise I’m aiming for around the same price as a fancy mechanical keyboard. Since it’s open-source you can of course build your own, but if it finds an audience I might consider selling them as well.
I’ll begin prototyping sometime after Halloween 2023 and post more info as the prototype takes shape. In the meantime you can always watch this repo for more incremental updates.