Github link: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry
Here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb8_ld9gOQ
I've been using it for almost two years now, and I'm not going back.
It's based on a spare Blackberry Q10 keyboard and a custom Arduino-compatible board that reads the keyboard matrix and outputs it as USB HID to the phone. From the viewpoint of the phone, it's just a regular USB keyboard, so no special software is needed.
But I do use a custom virtual keyboard to have just two rows of symbols that are not natively on the keyboard, as I didn't want to add another layer of rarely used symbols that I'd have to memorize.
(On the image you can see Ubuntu with XFCE4 running on it. I chose Ubuntu because it's what was easiest to get running in a chroot jail on the phone. I'm using VNC to display the GUI. I even managed to get FEX (x86/x64 emulator) and Wine running, so it runs x86/x64 Linux and Windows apps.)
That’s incredible, happy to see the old hardware still kicking!
On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.
As someone who is on the other side of that conversation a lot, I do appreciate it whenever someone asks me about that weird thing I have in my hands ;)
I got this a lot more when I had it in copper/wood (top part was wood filament, bottom part copper filament), but I only have these colors in PLA, which is not durable at all. So I switched to the plain-black PETG and now people don't notice it any more. I'm considering reprinting it in transparent PETG.
Awesome, let us know when you do it in transparent PETG!
Will do!
Btw, this is how it looked in copper/wood:
Wow, was not expecting it to look that good!
Great work!
I did like the combination. Sadly, PLA isn't very sturdy, and wood filled filament is even worse.