I was frustrated by the lack of decent phones with physical keyboards. The phones that are currently available are hard to buy, crap, expensive, are old, outdated, have bad software support and/or disappointing hardware.
So I decided to design and build one myself.
This is a Fairphone 4 with a DIY, open source keyboard attachment. It uses a spare Blackberry Q10 keyboard and a custom, self designed Arduino-compatible mainboard, which translates the keyboard matrix to regular USB HID.
This means, it works on any phone without the need of any software modification at all. If the phone can handle a USB keyboard, it can handle this one.
All that’s necessary to make it compatible to any other phone is to adjust the case to fit that phone.
(And yes, that’s XFCE running on Ubuntu in a chroot jail.)
Well done! Very reminiscent of the Typo case made for iphone (before they were sued into oblivion by Blackberry). I would pay good money to have one that could fit my current iphone. Sorely miss physical qwerty with how many typos autocorrect forces onto me.
Lucky for me, Blackberry doesn’t exist as a phone maker any more, and since this is non-commercial, there are also no damages to be sued for.
This can actually work with an iphone, you just need to use a lightning-USB-OTG connector instead of the USB-C-OTG connector.
Any chance I can commission one from you??