Arduino is too wasteful. I can't use 40 cycles to change the state of a single pin.

Is it that bad? wow

Yep. Check the source code for

digitalWrite

for example. You will be amazed.

Then you might find Smooth to be of use. Would be awesome if someone else used it 🙂

Maybe down the line. Now it's back to TornadoFX for me :))

I have so much to catch up on in TFX, been doing exclusively electronics/Smooth since early spring

Come to San Francisco, and I'll help you catch up!

So what's missing from a regular keyboard, @edvin?

(Sorry everyone for flooding the channel with non-TornadoFX stuff, I will stop after this short rant)

@edvin hehe we should start another channel tornadoKeys

Well, normal keyboards are staggered, while there is no good reason for them to be. Moving your fingers up and down a grid is much easier for us humans, and lends itself much better to using more fingers while touch typing. On a normal keyboard you use your weak pinkies a lot, for stuff like enter and maybe backspace (many use the ring finger there). It makes a lot of sense to use the strong index finger instead, so enter and backspace is placed vertically in the middle of the keyboard. It also forces you to use the right hand and not cross over into the other hand's territory. Then you have the split space bar. Most people use only one thumb, the other is just hanging there. On TornadoKeyboard one of the space bars (or both) is an FN key, so holding that will enable F rows on top as well as arrow keys and even mouse control. It is also fully programmable, so you can change the layout and functionality around however you choose. There will be a graphical configurator written in TornadoFX of course. The F row is removed, because it's just too long a reach, you can't get to it without moving your whole hand/palm. Therefore you just reuse the number keys while holding FN for F keys. There are lots of other goodies as well.

I also got rid of the CapsLock key, since nobody should be yelling anyways. You can enable it on a layer if you want, but it's much better to reuse the CapsLock key position as FN or even CTRL if you like.

Some even like backspace there. It's on the home row, so it's easier to get to than the normal position at least.

Wow, never even considered there was a need to change things that radically! But I do see your point

I think a lot of people will get these things, and not feel that they are really radical. It's not like I'm asking you to give up QWERTY (even though it's easily reprogrammed for DVORAK or COLEMAK), so all you need to adapt to is the grid, which only takes a couple of days for most people. Enter in the middle is easy, as you don't hit it constantly. After adapting to the grid you will get a much nicer feeling in your hands while typing, at least I did.

Well, my pinkie is pressing my enter key with no sweat 😛

@permalmberg I'm trying to get some interest up for a tornadofx spectrum analyzer. Take a scope feed and do the FFT

@carlw Ok, but why? Scopes not good enough?

Mine lacks computational power so open source projects are popping up to offload the processing to a computer

Good hardware solutions only cover high ranges; I'm doing audio

There are some handheld ones that I'm looking at but the UI doesn't seem good

I have some graphic eq ICs coming and am going to hook up an arduino or teensy

Sound like a fun project

sorry if my replies are short and slow - debugging my framework

I'm trying to recruit one of the JavaFX heavyweights Carl Dea who works in this problem domain too; in tornadofx

Working with uC's is fun, but when things don't work as expected, it can be a real pain to debug

@permalmberg if something doesn't work I just blame ohms law

@edvin Btw, if you're not using the nightly builds of KiCad, you really should. So much better than the latest stable release.

@User uploaded a file:

Almost unreal to see that in writing 🙂 Excited and a bit scared!