Do Pumpkins Make Good Mechanical Keyboards?

Until you actually like pumpkin pies or roasted pumpkin seeds, then all of these pumpkins you purchased for fall décor and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns are going to go to a landfill. You would feed your outdated pumpkins to animals like pigs, however you don’t personal pigs, do you? Fortunately for the pigless amongst you who hate waste, there may be one use for pumpkins that you just undoubtedly haven’t considered: as the bottom for laptop keyboards. Impressed by a unusual outdated typewriter, Elijah Horland turned a pumpkin right into a form of spherical mechanical keyboard.

Horland was clearly channeling Michael Reeves when he tackled this venture and made his video, however we gained’t maintain that towards him since he did it properly. His inspiration for this venture got here from the unusual and traditionally important Hansen Writing Ball. That bizarre typewriter was first inbuilt 1865 after which in 1870 grew to become the primary typewriter ever bought commercially. Its inventor, Reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen, solved most of the sensible issues with typewriter mechanisms by arranging the keys round a hemisphere. Horland took an identical strategy with this venture by inserting key switches throughout the roughly spherical floor of a pumpkin.

Other than the odd form and the usage of a gourd as an enclosure, it is a fairly standard hand-wired mechanical keyboard. The controller is an Arduino Professional Micro board and it screens the 54 key switches via a matrix setup (full with anti-ghosting diodes). Horland mounted the important thing switches to the pumpkin by first chopping out round plugs from the gourd’s outer husk. He then ran the wires via these to the Arduino sitting within the pumpkin’s inside, then caught the plugs again in.