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.)

  • rikonium
    28·
    1 year ago

    That’s incredible, happy to see the old hardware still kicking!

    On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.

    • Square Singer@feddit.deOP
      11·
      1 year ago

      On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.

      As someone who is on the other side of that conversation a lot, I do appreciate it whenever someone asks me about that weird thing I have in my hands ;)

      I got this a lot more when I had it in copper/wood (top part was wood filament, bottom part copper filament), but I only have these colors in PLA, which is not durable at all. So I switched to the plain-black PETG and now people don’t notice it any more. I’m considering reprinting it in transparent PETG.