About Quijit
Quijit is a creation of SoLaTiDo Inc., which is an early stage start up, concentrating on the human factors that influence the potential of mobile devices to become as useful and productive as personal computers.
We are all now about to join the marching band
Please don’t bring a piano
The central point of Quijit is to create a physical human-computer interface that can be held in front of the user to allow all fingers to create content or control some process without having to sit down at a horizontal keyboard. This position is well known to musicians, since they must use all fingers to greatest advantage and practice enough to allow their muscle memory and tactile feedback to enable them to perform at their highest capability. While our phones and tablets require us to manipulate the interface from the side we can see, many musical instruments require us to play the far side of the instrument because that’s just how our fingers bend. The keys and strings on these instruments are positioned to take greatest advantage of the way we are built. It is also important to use this arrangement when using instruments in a marching band. With mobile computing, we are all now in the marching band and a stationary, horizontal keyboard is the equivalent of a piano.
With that geometry in mind, Quijit will allow us to take best advantage of our fingers by placing most of the keys on the far side and placing more keys and a couple of joy-sticks on the near side. Don’t worry, the positions of the keys will be visible for practice and reference in the head-mounted display. This is necessary not only for adjusting to the new position, but because the keyboard and controls can be reprogrammed on the fly to be any keyboard layout, or any instrument, or whatever you might imagine you want it to be.
So . . . Quijit will essentially be held like a sandwich and played like a saxophone.
The Evolution of Quijit
Welcome to Quijit! Unleash your creativity with our hand-held workstation control for AR, VR, & the Metaverse. Stay tuned for our Kickstarter campaign!
Original Concept
Original concept using tactile switches, tiny joysticks, and a touch-pad. The switches are small, affordable, and they feel acceptable. Unfortunately, they are a bit too noisy for this application.
The First Prototype
The appearance prototype felt mostly OK so it was time to really prototype it.
The electronic prototype worked pretty well, but the noisy switches really took the joy out of it by entering some characters multiple times. Too much code was required to de-bounce these switches. Nobody liked it.
Adding full-size joy sticks made sense and required a bit more thickness to accommodate the joy stick’s depth.
Other concepts contemplated a mouse pad and extruded aluminum frames that would accommodate auxiliary equipment like we see in photographic equipment. (This can probably be adequately served with some mounting holes in the housing of the final design.)
Quijit 2.0
Another concept is to include hinges that allow the finger side to fold out so that all the keys can face up from a desk for those who want to type at a desk sometimes. It accommodates a phone as the central computing module. While this is a possibility for a future product, it became very valuable in explaining to skeptics how you don’t have to learn a new typing position, you just fold your hand around the sides and your fingers type on the same pattern you already know on a standard QWERTY keyboard. (For those who are not touch-typists yet, you may have an advantage. It is easier to learn on a Dvorak keyboard layout since all the vowels are on the left-hand home row and the rest of the letters are laid out according to their frequency of use, leaving you as near the ‘home row’ as possible. Since this typing position allows for less arm movement, staying close to the home row avoids the larger finger excursion of the QWERTY layout.)
The Present Design
The present design has 48 typing style keys on the far (finger) side, and another 25 identical keys on the near (thumb) side, along with 8 button style keys and two joy-sticks. The key switches are Kailh Choc low-profile mechanical switches and the joy-sticks are like the ones in most game controllers. The goal is to make this device as hackable and repairable as possible. The electronic function is based on an included Raspberry Pi Zero-W. To make access easy, visible screws will be used so the user may make desired changes or replace the battery. 3D files will be made available for those who wish to modify the housing through 3D printing or CNC machining to include various mounting points or other geometry that best suits their own purposes. Communication will be via Bluetooth, WiFi, and a USB port. All keys and controls will be fully re-programmable so they can be any letter, symbol, musical note, or macro desired. It will have full key rollover so you can trigger as many keys simultaneously as you desire. (This is especially important in musical applications where complex chords are played.)
This is a view of the thumb side that faces toward the user.
This is a view of the finger side that faces away from the user
This is a partially transparent CAD model showing some internals. The Raspberry Pi Zero-W is in the lower right corner of the upper layer so its connectors can be accessed from outside.
On the finger side that faces away from the user, apps will be available to help construct graphics to learn whatever key patterns are on this side by animating practice keystrokes in 3D in the head-mounted-display, Space Invaders style. Keys will be left blank since they will be representing different actions in various applications and the labeling is best presented in the headgear. Different patterns may be switched between applications on the fly. We programmed our first prototype so the lowermost keys on either edge of the thumb side would switch between QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts, since we didn’t all type on QWERTY.
Meet Our Team
Tom Sherlock
Founder
Tom has been designing industrial and consumer products for thirty years. He was part of the design team that created the first battery powered laptop computer and did the mechanical designs for the power supply transformers and rectifier units for the multi terawatt Shiva Laser Fusion Experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.He is named inventor on the three issued U.S. patents and three more pending international patent applications on which this product is based, and nine more U.S. patents covering sports equipment, biotech, mechanisms, solar heat pumps, and petrochemical testing.
Gwen Fuller
Marketing Director
Gwen Fuller has a rich portfolio in fine art and graphic design. She has a B.A. in Communications from Stanford University and a certificate in graphic design from U.C. Santa Cruz.
Jim Loftus
Hardware/Software Designer
Jim Loftus has a background in biology, electronics, and robotics design in a wide range of products. Though his college work was in bioinformatics and cell biology, he has spent most of his career in the design of electronic and robotic products.