zenkalia

How hard is it to make an offline model like this learn?

The readme mentions a memory that lasts as long as each conversation which seems like such a hard limitation to live with.

All these OSS projects are cool but it's worth noting that the industry standard for this is Gerber:

https://www.lectra.com/en/products/gerber-accumark-accunest-...

My mother was a "grader" and her workflow was actually very similar to software engineering. A designer would give her sketches of a garment. She would figure out how to build it - break it down to individual pieces of cloth and construction steps that then get fanned out to cutters and seamstresses to build.

When I got into software I found the parallels fascinating.

Not that I've seen. The Lilygo and BBQ20 keyboards all seem to use surplus Arabic BB keyboards that are made to be used with the little trackpad thing like on the tdeck.

overcome the arduous learning curve

Oh man. This reminds of the end of my developer career. I moved over to management because of awful RSI but in a desperate attempt to keep typing I learned the AlphaGrip. If I can master that thing, I can master anything!

http://www.alphagrip.com/

These things have unfortunately been sold out for a while. Not only that, if I wanted to use the BBQ20 with my phone I'd have to connect it to a BLE chip and a battery which is way more hacking than I wanted to do on this project.

That's the one! And this was the Clicks discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38871987

It's not very relevant to Lilygo tinkering but just a deep discussion of physical keyboards for phone use.

I don't need a tilde but I could add one in about 5 minutes if needed. It would be something like this:

https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/blob/bleeding_edge/ex...

except it would add a ~ rather than trigger an arrow key. I'd likely put it on sym+q so that it is in a similar space to a real keyboard.

I was discussing special characters with someone on github. If the character isn't in the font you'll have to do some extra work that I summarized in this comment: https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/T-keyboard/issues/10#issue...

In the comment above it the mapping table that I'm talking about is this one: https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/blob/bleeding_edge/ex... .

This is 100% true. The documentation isn't great. The code itself isn't great, either and it's the only thing you can go off of.

One thing Lilygo really should do is start merging pull requests. Many of them are fixing the documentation because we love tinkering with their devices and want to pave the way for others.

After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard, I felt like this needed to be shared. I nearly built something like the Clicks for myself but the closer I got the worse it seemed, ergonomically. Not only that the Clicks key layout only has shift on one side and it doesn't have a backlight.

Some background: I have been shopping around for a bluetooth keyboard to use for thumb typing for the last few months. I have a book to edit and a newborn that is always sleeping on my chest. I tried a few bluetooth keyboards from Amazon but they were all garbage.

Eventually I found the T-Keyboard and have been really pleased by it. This is the keyboard from the T-Deck with a little 160x40 screen attached to it. The screen allows you to see what you're typing on the device without looking at your phone. It boots in half a second which means switching back and forth is lightning fast. If I'm typing a few words, I stick to my touchscreen. I'm editing so there's a lot of selecting text to copy / paste / annotate which is also touchscreen work. When I need to add a new paragraph or more, I set my phone down and pick this thing up to type with.

It really is fantastic. If you decide to pick one up, you may want to run my fork which fixes a bunch of the usability issues: https://github.com/zenkalia/T-keyboard/tree/bleeding_edge

If you apply for a home loan, you will get about 100 calls per day for the first week and it will trickle away over the next two months. I still get 3~ per day. It's insane.