Check out this story and gadget.
In a nutshell, a fellow made a computer keyboard from portable manual typewriter.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There’s a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed.
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LOL! Necessity is the mother of invention.
This is is even better!
Turn your old Underwood #5 into a computer!
Remind me of the Rotary Cell Phone, which can be found here:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=287
Michael: Very cool. Could I have fun with that! Imagine too a little dial on your cellphone.
Father Z wrote:
“Imagine too a little dial on your cellphone.”
Fabulous!
Now…if they could put some roman numerals on that little cell phone dial…
Reminds me of these:
http://www.baronbob.com/pleasehold-giantcellphonehandset.htm
and
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/zoom/