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I made a FOSS physical keyboard for my Fairphone 4 (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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geteilt von: https://feddit.de/post/3048730

Github link: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry

Here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb8_ld9gOQ

I've been using it for almost two years now, and I'm not going back.

It's based on a spare Blackberry Q10 keyboard and a custom Arduino-compatible board that reads the keyboard matrix and outputs it as USB HID to the phone. From the viewpoint of the phone, it's just a regular USB keyboard, so no special software is needed.

But I do use a custom virtual keyboard to have just two rows of symbols that are not natively on the keyboard, as I didn't want to add another layer of rarely used symbols that I'd have to memorize.

(On the image you can see Ubuntu with XFCE4 running on it. I chose Ubuntu because it's what was easiest to get running in a chroot jail on the phone. I'm using VNC to display the GUI. I even managed to get FEX (x86/x64 emulator) and Wine running, so it runs x86/x64 Linux and Windows apps.)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My thing is only compatible with the Q10 keyboard. The others have different connectors.

I made a script that generates a case for you, if you want to go the easy route. That case just isn't exactly great compared to the hand-designed one. It works though, and all you need to input is the measurements of your phone.

Also, I remember the issue with BB patents and I think the problem was that this company used exact copy of BB keyboards. Like the keys were exactly the same shape. If someone would just make a small BT keyboard it would probably avoid patent issues. You do have small BT keyboards for tablets after all. Just making it even smaller shouldn’t be a patent violation.

Their patents are all specifically for keyboards on phones. So selling a Blackberry keyboard as an external keyboard is fine, attaching it to a phone is covered by the patents.

When Ryan Seacrest tried to make a very similar product (Typo keyboard for the iPhone), he was sued over these three patents:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7629964B2/en (expired by now), which is generally about keyboards on phones
https://patents.google.com/patent/USD685775S1/en, a design patent which patents a device that broadly looks like a blackberry phone (with a keyboard in portrait orientation), expires in 2027
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8162552B2/en, which patents phone keyboards with ramped keys, expires in 2031

So right now it's possible to make a phone with a keyboard, as long as it doesn't kinda roughly look like a Blackberry and as long as it doesn't use Blackberry's improved, shaped keycaps.

All these patents specifically refer to phones/"handheld communication devices".