Stenography

My interest in learning stenography started in August of 2020. I started learning on a qwerty keyboard and documented some of my progress on YouTube. After reaching more than 100 words per minute, I wanted to buy the hobbyist steno machine called the Georgi. It was $115 and my dad did not want to buy it for me. Instead, my dad suggested that I try making something myself. I took this is as a welcome challenge and followed a tutorial I found on the internet on designing a mechanical keyboard from scratch using KiCad. My first prototype, the Uni v1, had a green PCB and used an Arduino Pro Micro as the microcontroller. I shared photos of the keyboard on the Plover discord server and sold the first 20 prototypes within about one month. I made the Uni v2, which was black in color and had the option for a backplate. I hand-soldered each keyboard and 3d printed every keycap at home. After making about 200 Uni v2 keyboards, I launched a Kickstarter for the Uni v3 which had an integrated atmega32u4 microcontroller and was designed so that it can be mass-produced by a factory. The Kickstarter was a success, and in the process I learned how to correspond with the factories for production of keyboards.

I subsequently designed the Uni v4 and the Polyglot v1, which used an rp2040 microcontroller and also 16mb of storage. The 16mb of storage allowed community developer Tharelia (aka. jthlim or Jeff), to create Javelin, which is an embedded stenography firmware that allows users of the Uni v4 to use stenography without having to install software. The Uni v4 became the first widely available plug-and-play steno keyboard. I also designed and launched the Asterisk v1, which uses capacitive touch sensors, which significantly brought down its price. Designing the Asterisk gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding of how capacitive touch sensors work and taught me the fundamentals of embedded C programming.