LATE-9

I came up with the idea of LATE-9 while, under the fever of "I need fewer keys" that 40% club instilled in me, I was trying to make a very small keyboard.

There are already out there some jokes about this "ultra-less is better" mentality, like the pain27 that describes itself as "an open-source keyboard project to make an easily usable, yet completely and utterly unusable qwerty keyboard". Perfect. I want to do something like that. But how can I achieve this in a different way?

I got this layout idea looking back to old mobile phones from the late '90s: they had the numerical 3x4 pad that you can use for input text too. There was two main input method: multi-tap and T9. With multi-tap, you had to press the same key multiple times to get the desired letter. T9 was the evolution because it used a dictionary to guess the word you want just by pressing every key only once.

I decided to put a screen in it just because I had never integrated one into past projects and because it seemed to fit the aesthetic pretty well.

The decision to use 6x6mm switches and not the standard ones for keyboards was driven by the feeling of the keypress. I was trying to evoke feelings from the past where buttons had this clicky sound, so this was my best bet.

The assembly was really easy, the hardest part was to take in place the components while PCB was facing downward.

The firmware was pretty tricky instead. I found on QMK documentation some examples but none of them seems to fit my needs. So I was lucky enough to find this Reddit thread where there was a perfect example of triple tap dance in the comments. I adapt it for my needs adding the possibility of holding down a key to send the number.

For punctuation, I used the 1 button binding in order: .,'?!-:;/ . The # key is coded for uppercase the next letter you input or, if hold pressed a while, switch caps lock on/off. The top two rows are used for navigation and enter/backspace keys.

OLED screen just displays my logo, but I'm trying to figure out how to use it to display the letter that the key I am pressing can print.

It was a very rewarding project because I had to learn a lot of new (at least new for me LOL) QMK functionality like tap dance, one shot keys, and OLED integration.

The final evolution of the LATE-9 could be an integrated dictionary for T9, where the proposed word is shown on the OLED screen and can be changed by pressing * before sending it to the PC. If you had suggestions on how to achieve it without any program on PC (so not like this one with autokey) it would be much appreciated, feel free to contact me on any social media you find on the homepage (preferably Reddit).

If you are interested in building one for yourself everything you need is in the Github repo Also, there is a pull request for the firmware but, until approval, you can find it in my QMK fork.

Quick follow-up: I just find out Guy Dupont's video where he seems to achieve the T9 thing, but he doesn't explain how he had done it. I'll wait for his next upload!