If you have a spare mechanical keyboard lying dormant and looking for some love, you may be interested in a new project that has been created by Lauri Hakkarainen who has built Project Kiiboard.
Project Kiiboard consists of installing a Raspberry Pi 2 inside a mechanical keyboard providing both a portable computer system and the benefits of a mechanical keyboard.
Hakkarainen explains little more about his thought process and the project :
“I have been interested about mechanical keyboards (you know, those oldschool clicky ones) since I was a kid – heck, we used those regularly back in the day. The clicking noise has burned into my memory, and I just loved the tactile feel of those buttons. Nowadays my everyday keyboard is the integrated one on a Macbook Pro. It’s not bad for a laptop keyboard, so I really haven’t had any excuse to buy a mechanical one to carry around with my Mac.
What keyboard should I pick then? I have two main attributes I look for: The keyboard should be relatively compact, and it should have a familiar layout. I decided to go with a tenkeyless keyboard since I use the tenkeys rarely, and I want to have a small keyboard. I also wanted they keyboard to have a Finnish/Swedish layout. So after a bit of googling, I found a Filco Majestouch-2 Tenkeyless keyboard with Finnish layout and brown switches (Brown switches do not make so much noise, but still have the same feel as the old clicky ones).
Next step was to find out if there was enough space inside the keyboard to fit the Pi. I don’t naturally have that keyboard, so I asked Reddit. Reddit has an active community of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, so I got my response quickly, with images! You can always trust the Hive Mind of Reddit. It seemed that there is only 8mm clearance inside the keyboard, which would be a too tight fit, I thought. It could be done by stripping off almost all of the connectors, but I would rather not sacrifice the ethernet port. So, let’s find another keyboard instead!”
You can follow the story of his creation of the Raspberry Pi 2 mechanical keyboard case over on the Seek website with full instructions and diagrams to help you create your very own.
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