Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by hannasanarion on Thursday January 06, 2022 @02:36PM (#29828744)

The learning curve for stenography is much higher. With a keyboard, the buttons do exactly what they say and that only. With a stenography machine, every possible combination of buttons does a different thing.

When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with those labels, and hit them in sequence.

To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once, knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for 'prepared'.

You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by megous on Thursday January 06, 2022 @05:49PM (#29831646)

Keyboards that use multiplexed row/column electrical matrix will not allow you to detect more than two keys in any box pattern simultaneously. So pressing more than two keys on that virtual steno keyboard is impossible on a regular keyboard (for many key combinations).

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by floatboth on Thursday January 06, 2022 @09:01PM (#29833788)

Any decent (gaming/enthusiast/high-end) keyboard uses dioded on every key to achieve N-key rollover (sometimes only 4KRO on the USB output due to sticking with boot protocol or whatever other reasons)

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by hannasanarion on Friday January 07, 2022 @11:55AM (#29841495)

The software has a workaround to account for that, as long as you keep one key held down, the "stroke" isn't considered finished.

Obviously if you're gonna use it as you daily driver, you'd want to get a NKRO keyboard, but the "hold one key and tap the rest" trick works for the web demo.

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by megous on Friday January 07, 2022 @02:36PM (#29843660)

Ah, nice, I didn't notice that while trying to use it. :)

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by artiii on Thursday January 06, 2022 @07:54PM (#29833145)

multiplexed row/col is not problem here. By adding more components (1 normal diode per key) you can detect all pressed keys. Normal keyboard can detect even 4 keys (not all combination ofc) by clever design.

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by megous on Friday January 07, 2022 @02:45PM (#29843766)

Yes, but that's usually limited to modifier keys. This app expects the user to use multi-letter key combos, which the keyboards usually don't support. I have several normal keyboards at home and none can deal with that.

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Re:Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing... by tinus_hn on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:27AM (#29851924)

This was solved decades ago by simply pulsing the rows in sequence and reading the columns for each row. You can trivially do that hundreds of times per second.

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