Little keyboards for little hands

This is my newest keyboard. 

Isn't it adorable? I bought it a few years back from Jack Reitano / thnikk on Etsy ^[1] with the intention of programming the keys to do the Zoom mute/unmute shortcut ^[2]… but the firmware didn’t support multi-key strokes and rewriting the firmware was a little too much effort relative to my need, so it’s been sitting in my “Tech & Cables” bin waiting for its day in the sun.

AND THAT DAY ARRIVED! Enter Disney Dreamlight valley, or – as we call it in my house – "The Pressing 'E' Game".

The Pressing E Game is a life simulation adventure game where you wander around a Disney-themed world helping various Disney characters out with their day-to-day life and saving the world. It’s extremely low stress, there’s no way to fail, and it’s the perfect game to play with a very small child. I started playing it with Cayce in 2022 when she was nearly three and we were preparing to go on a Disney cruise to get her used to some of the characters she wasn’t familiar with. Like many “mouse + WASD” games, the E key handles a lot of interactions – from picking stuff up to chatting with characters – and even at two, Cayce was pretty good at finding and pressing the letter E on my keyboard.

We figured out a system where I’d twist myself around to use the number pad arrows for movement and the mouse, and she could hit the ‘E’ on the keyboard. And for the last two years, we’ve done that, expanding her responsibilities to include Escape (to exit menus) and sometimes Spacebar (to use the currently-selected tool). It wasn’t what I would call ergonomic, but it mostly worked. AND THEN I REMEMBERED MY LITTLE TWO KEY KEYBOARD.

The little keyboard friend is configurable on Mac/Linux using screen so I plugged it into my iMac and followed the instructions in the docs:

screen $(ls -d /dev/* | grep "ACM\|usbmodem") 9600

This opened up a simple UI to remap the keyboard, and Cayce got to press the keys she wanted and hit 0 to save and exit. Easy peasy.

No bespoke keyboard is complete without some nice keycaps, so Cayce and I stole the ‘E’ key off the split ergonomic keyboard I never managed to get the hang of and pulled out one of my fancy keycaps (it looks like a Gameboy!) for the Escape key and swapped out the default flat caps for the fancy ones. Now I get to sit at my keyboard normally, she gets her own little keyboard that does what it needs to, and everyone is happy.

I’m really excited about this project for a few reasons beyond the improved ergonomics of playing The Pressing E Game for me:

• It let me create a better experience for Cayce, who is absolutely delighted to have her own special little keyboard.
• It let me show Cayce that technology isn’t immutable, we should be able to modify things to suit our needs and we shouldn’t be afraid to do so.
• It got her excited about using a command line interface, which delights me because she is four^[3].

Unfortunately, the kids saw me while I was working on this blog post and now they’re begging me to acquire more tiny keyboards for them, like this cute one from ziddymakes, which should do what I want with the Zoom mute/unmute, and which I am now contemplating. Mechanical keyboards truly are a gateway drug.