Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard

A while back I was frustrated when wanting to buy a keyboard that there were no triangle-shaped keyboards or circle-shaped keyboards. This lack of peculiar keyboard shapes gave me the idea to make a keyboard that could be reconfigurable into any shape my heart desired. I’m still working on the firmware and making more keys but I wanted to share my progress so far. Heres the source if anyone’s interested in how I made it: https://github.com/notaroomba/keybytes

I like the idea but I could only find an image of two keys. It would be great to see a demo of a full layout. With only two keys it's a very early POC and hardly a keyboard. Does communication work well and feel snappy with a full set of keys? How is the structural integrity of a full one? Can it be easily moved around? That type of questions could easily make this unusable at scale.

Fantastic work, I'm always excited to new modular input device projects like this. Are the connectors actually direction-agnostic? Looking at the layout it seems like depending on which side you connect you have a 50% chance of having the pin order reversed, and there don't appear to be any additional switching components correcting for it. I've tried designing similar modular PCBs (though nothing this mature or tiny!), and always run into this same issue - a design problem that's been in the back of my mind for years now, and I'm constantly searching for a new approaches. Do you have plans to address this so that any side can connect to any side? Or can they already and I've missed something?

The I2C has limit of 127 of different addresses. Also there can be I2C hang, especially when there is that many slaves on the bus. Maybe using CAN is better.

This is awesome! How does the rigidity of the keyboard hold up with many keys and what's the cost of the materials at higher order quantity?