Thanks for all the donations! Been putting them to very good use by ordering a lot of parts for testing!

Last purchase was a HTC Desire Z hinge. I think this makes a good candidate because:

-It feel and snaps very nice
-Available, not to pricey in bulk
-Very very easy construction because of the floating flex cable (important)



Note: this is just for the hinge mechanism. I think the keypad is terrible

Progress update:

Now the daemon gets the interrupt from keyboard chip, and reads input report from it over i2c...

debug dump of single keypress and release: (6sec long)

2014-01-14 22:22:39 :: TOH Interrupt reached interrupt handler routine.
2014-01-14 22:22:39 :: Input report: 0b 00 ee 00 00 9a 00 00 00 00 00
2014-01-14 22:22:45 :: TOH Interrupt reached interrupt handler routine.
2014-01-14 22:22:45 :: Input report: 0b 00 ee 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00


Something strange still with multiple simultaneous keypresses.

Then some level of functionality in getting keypresses to the applications gained by using uinput device..

I can create virtual input device!
[root@localhost input]# cat /sys/devices/virtual/input/input36/name
tohkbd


Simple test sends keystrokes.
/dev/uinput opened succesfully
tohkbd created succesfully
sending test
send key 0 == 37
send key 1 == 23
send key 2 == 50
send key 3 == 50
send key 4 == 24
send key 5 == 57
send key 6 == 20
send key 7 == 18
send key 8 == 31
send key 9 == 20
send key 10 == 30
send key 11 == 30
tohkbd destroyed succesfully


And this appears to screen only after i close/destroy the device (so not key-by-key as expected). And also the onscreen keyboard needs to be active.

The Desire Z hinge is in!

First impression:
-Feels solid
-About 30mm travel
-Qwerty-OH will be +-7mm thickness increase when slided in

Edit: 9mm -> 7 mm

With the Desire Z hinge I can make it something like this:

Non extended:


Extended


31mm travel
7 mm extra thickness to phone
Edit: 6 mm increase should also be doable
Edit: does 5 mm sound okay?

What is length of the flex, i can check do i have something in my sample 'stock' ...

45-50 mm, must be at least 5 tracks

Edit: ordered some of these with connectors

Okay, I can squeeze it to 5 mm thickness increase! However, a part of the hinges will be visible.



I love showing of mechanical parts especially hinges!

that hinge mechanism really reminds me of the N97

I loved that design, the keyboard was so so, but they way it would open and rotate over and end up at an incline and not parallel to the keyboard In my opinion was very cool

keep it up man

Okay, that Desire Z hinge is causing a lot of troubles..

The point is this: no matter what, the hinge is 9 mm thick. So either the whole case will be 9 mm thick, or you have two bulges of 3.5mm sticking out of the bottom...


I love the feel of the hinge, but 9mm extra or two bulges is not acceptable for me..

Or accept a 8mm increase in thickness and add 1200mAh...