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Owner
Mission
My Role
Tools
Leo Yam (Personal Project)
Create a way to put Figma's GUI buttons into a physical keyboard to reduce precise controls, with the goal to boost productivity
Project vision, Hardware design and tinkering, Software tinkering
Figma, ARM32 assembly
😥 The problem
Imagine you are working on a prototype that have been on your mind for quite some time, and you have to align a few components horizontally. What do you do?
With a pointing device (mouse, trackpad), you have to move across a thousand pixels away from your craft. Your eyeball will also follow along to aim at the tiny 16x16 click area. And when we add it up a couple hundred times, this is a massive distraction.
What’s worse? Your Figma window doesn’t always stay in the same place. Be it connecting to monitors of different sizes, or simply having to rearrange your windows differently to reply to a Slack message, watch cat videos, etc. It’s just not possible to form muscle memory.
🤔 What if…
There is something that allows you to toggle the Figma features you need but without any long and precise manoeuvre? It’s even better if forming muscle memory is possible.
💡 Hypothesis
By clicking on a set of physical buttons around my hands, it will shorten the time to toggle the Figma tool I need. (And possibly form muscle memory)
👆 The first stab
Before I destroy any keyboards, I tried mapping out the features I need the most and their ideal locations for my reach. It took me 2 weeks.
👆 Trying it for real
After perfecting the layout, it’s time for me to label the buttons, so it’s easier for me to memorise which button does what.
Is muscle memory better than GUI?
In short, yes. 🙌 It has a satisfying tactile feedback and sound, decorates my work desk, and muscle memory is possible to form.
Productivity-wise, my guess is that 10 seconds can be saved each hour. However, I had to add 10 mins back for the conversations with curious teammates. (Oops)
💡 What’s next?
Like any other loved projects in the world, there is always something to improve.
I want a smaller so there’s no excess buttons to clutter up my desk. Oh, it’s even better if I could write the macro within the firmware, so I can plug and play on any computers.
That means I need a more compact keyboard with the capability to store custom key mapping.
This time around, the labels are tucked beneath the keycap, which makes replacing a macro much easier, and I absolutely love the looks and the matte texture.
And there we have it!
Macros are written to the ARM/STM32 chip inside this lovely OLKB Plank v6 keyboard. And this is paired with Gateron green switch, which is a clicky boi at 65g actuation force.
It's not only a helpful tool, it's also an eye candy 🍬
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