Options for getting the Clicky sound

Hi!

I’ve been thinking about one thing: I really do like to have a clicky noise when I push some buttons on a keyboard. Kinesis Advantage has a built-in peeper/speaker inside, and I think it is one of its nicest features.

So, I have some options for getting clicky sounds:
(1) Build a speaker into Keyboardio. Has anyone done this already?
(2) Wait for Clicky keys variation to return. Disadvantage is that clickyness cannot be disabled for office.
(3) Build a device that takes keyboard signals in, outputs the same keyboard signal unchanged, and additionally makes noises when detects keyboard clicks with its speaker.
(4) Use Bucklespring: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring. Tried that, I have to customize it to produce only mono sound as stereo is awful when using headphones, and change the output sound to something nicer than bucklespring sound. I would have to try more to see if the response latency is small enough for me to notice.
(5) Build a device that takes the keyboard in, similar to (3), and addional input of computer speaker output. The device would multiplex the computer speaker output and its generated click sounds to the final output. So, It would be same as option (4) but done in hardware.

Anyone have any thoughts? Are there any devices doing these things already available?

1 Like

Not sure if anyone’s done it, but the board has extension PINs, so you might be able to hook something up to it, modify the firmware a little, and get what you want.

My impression has been that Clicky variants are not likely to return anytime soon, if ever.

This is more complicated than it sounds, because the device would have to implement a lot of protocol parsing. You also need to keep power use in mind: the device will need some power of its own, and supply the Model01 with enough power too. Basically, you’d be building a smarter USB hub. Not a trivial task.

For the record, there’s an USB-to-USB device, described over at GeekHack. It comes with quite serious limitations. Mind you, for only adding sound, and otherwise letting everything through as is, you can get rid of most of the limitations. It’s still not an easy task, mind you.

If you’re going to build hardware, I’d suggest going with option one instead, that’s a lot less trouble. :slight_smile: