Google Japan's conveyor belt keyboard brings the keys to you
Most custom keyboard projects try to make typing more comfortable. This one goes the other way on purpose. Google Japan has built a deliberately impractical keyboard in which the keys move and your fingers stay still.
It has four staggered rows. Each row is a 3D-printed chain that carries mechanical key switches, and a motor in the base drives the belts. A flexible PCB in each row keeps the wiring connected as the chain moves. The project is published with firmware, STL files and a build guide, so anyone with a printer could in theory try it.
The interesting question is how a key press gets off the moving belt and to the computer. According to the write-up, that part of the guide is still marked "TBD" and the source code looks incomplete. The author floats a few untested ideas: a small BLE microcontroller on each belt, RFID tags on each key with readers in the base, or LEDs on the flex PCB that flash each key's ASCII code past a sensor.
It follows Google Japan's earlier hat keyboard from 2023 and rotary-phone keyboard from 2025. Nobody will daily-drive this, but I enjoy how it pokes at the basic assumptions of the layout.
Source: Hackaday
It has four staggered rows. Each row is a 3D-printed chain that carries mechanical key switches, and a motor in the base drives the belts. A flexible PCB in each row keeps the wiring connected as the chain moves. The project is published with firmware, STL files and a build guide, so anyone with a printer could in theory try it.
The interesting question is how a key press gets off the moving belt and to the computer. According to the write-up, that part of the guide is still marked "TBD" and the source code looks incomplete. The author floats a few untested ideas: a small BLE microcontroller on each belt, RFID tags on each key with readers in the base, or LEDs on the flex PCB that flash each key's ASCII code past a sensor.
It follows Google Japan's earlier hat keyboard from 2023 and rotary-phone keyboard from 2025. Nobody will daily-drive this, but I enjoy how it pokes at the basic assumptions of the layout.
Source: Hackaday
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