The Trochee keyboard will be designed to optionally house a variety of single-board computers to provide a complete modular computing system, minus a monitor and pointing device. Built-in solutions for these may be explored in the future but are currently out of the scope of initial prototyping.
A few models will be made to house an AtomicPi single-board computer. It is sadly a bit underpowered and only has 2GB RAM, but at just $31 for an x86 processor capable of running Windows, they ought to not be passed up. For the first time, a consumer can be offered a complete modular system for a reasonable price without asking them to learn a new operating system, or be limited to using sofware that runs on ARM. For folks wanting a more capable x86 machine, there seems to be no shortage of affordable SBCs coming out that we could also offer.
I'm starting with an extremely simple "unified" design, a compact 64-key layout that is an 8x8 square:
Obviously note that there is no separate thumb cluster. Having never gotten accustomed to one I likely don't know what I'm missing, but removing it really appeals to me in terms of symmetry and space economy. The Maltron is essentially a bowl-shape anyway, I just decided to take it to its logical extreme. This also allows a single design to be used for no-hands (vertically mounted, mouth/stick) use, or a modified left/right handed Dvorak layout:
The RH layout shown above was made from this Google spreadsheet. The LH version can be a mirror image of it. 8 columns were chosen since it will just fit the letters in this configuration. It should be no wider as to minimize lateral finger movement, with 3 extra rows on top for the numbers, arrows and other less frequently used keys.
- See issue #3