this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Free and Open Source Software

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If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


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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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[–] Sdnimm543@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just got a Titan pocket. That's a really cool alternative!

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I wanted a bit more performance than what the Titan provides. I wish there was a decent midrange version of the Titan pocket.

[–] Sdnimm543@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

totally fair. I do wish there was more than like, a handful of modern keyboard phones.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

And I wish there were some that are actually good phones. All of them have either really outdated or low-end hardware, bad cameras, bad or no software updates and so on...