Chord Keyboard Trainer

ChatGPT is officially amazing. I wanted to make a chord trainer for my PICO powered chord keyboard. So I pasted the Python source for the device into ChatGPT and asked it to make a JavaScript program that could train a user on the chords. And, after a fair bit of discussion we’ve managed to make the program I wanted.

We did have some fun. ChatGPT was determined to put linefeed characters into string literals rather than ‘\n’, which made the program break a few times. The worst bug we found was that when you are entering text into the game and press the space bar this can re-trigger the “Start New Game” button to very confusing effect.

However, it now works. If you want to test your Micro Writing skills you can have a go. If you type a letter quickly, before the help layout appears, you get 5 points. Otherwise you only get one. You can use the other buttons to get a complete list of the keys.

You can find it on GitHub here. You can have a go with it here.

Bluetooth MicroWriter keyboard in the works

A while back I made a MicroWriter keyboard which lets you input text by entering chords on six input keys. It worked very well, but it emulated a wired keyboard. Now that the Raspberry Pi PICO can now talk Bluetooth I’ve started working on a wireless version. I’m going to have a go at designing my own PCB for it. I’ve bought some sockets for the keys. And some keys.

My original keyboard code is written in Circuit Python but there is no Python support for Bluetooth on the PICO just yet. My plan is to convert the code to C++. This shouldn’t be too hard. Most of the work is in the character decoding arrays.