The typewriter-keyboard conversion!
Yes, it really works. Even down to slapping the carriage return for Enter.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lam?, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that..."
Yes, it really works. Even down to slapping the carriage return for Enter.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lam?, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that..."
