Update: The Fairberry's creator has given All3DP insight into the project's background and history which we've incorporated below. Thanks, Dakkaron!
Keen-eyed readers may have noticed our penchant for odd or out-of-fashion tech, particularly smartphones, so this BlackBerry-style keyboard mod is 100% up our alley.
Repurposing a spare keyboard for the BlackBerry Q10 (easily found online for the price of a cup of coffee) and smooshing it together with a custom PCB configured with an ATMega32U4, resistors, capacitors, and other tiny but necessary components via a PCB assembly service, Redditor Square_Singer’s Fairberry project is a not-unattractive add-on that plugs into the phone’s USB-C port, extending the overall footprint but adding a fully backlit, QWERTY keyboard for your thumbs’ message-mashing pleasure.
“I am a software engineer by trade, and 3D printing and electronics are long-term hobbies of mine” Square_Singer (GitHub handle Dakkaron), tells All3DP. “I turned my biggest hobby (programming) into a job before, and I don’t want to do this again, so I’m doing the Fairberry as a pure open source project with no financial interest.” The motivation for developing a device-agnostic mobile keyboard becomes a little clearer.
“I used to always have phones with physical keyboards. I write a lot on my phone and I often use CLI or program on my phone. Virtual keyboards are OK for typing short texts in natural language, but they are much worse when writing formal language, like programming or command-line commands. Sadly, keyboard phones became a very niche category. While you can still get phones with acceptable keyboards, the phone part of the phone usually lags behind a lot.”
Initial concepts for the Fairberry included side-swiping keyboard mechanisms, like those seen on phones like the Motorola Droid 4, but Dakkaron ran into issues with this design. “I couldn’t overcome the balance issues. Sliding keyboard phones usually put all their heavy components into the keyboard half, only leaving the screen in the screen half. This way, the weight stays in your hands and the balance is nice. Sadly, this can’t be done if you are making an attachment for a phone.”
You can listen to the oh-so-satisfying clicks in the video below.
Several prototypes followed before a breakthrough allowed the Fairberry to take a transformative step forward. “After roughly 10 different side-sliding/side-mounted attachments, I stumbled over the BlackBerry Q10 keyboard. It’s small, readily available, cheap, and well-documented. (Thanks, by the way, to the GitHub user arturo182, who did all the reverse engineering!)”
Earlier versions of the Fairberry required soldering and were more limited in device flexibility. Over further iterations and jumping from a Fairphone 4 to a Samsung Galaxy A54, Dakkaron’s project evolved. In addition to moving from one phone to another, they “moved from Blender to OpenSCAD for the design of the keyboard case. The upside of that is that now there is a good, parameterized script that generates the keyboard cases. This allows anyone to adapt the Fairberry keyboard attachment to any phone they like.”
“The trickiest part about building a Fairberry is that it involves multiple different skill sets. Originally, you needed good skills in soldering, 3D modelling in Blender, and 3D printing. My biggest focus for the last release was to reduce the amount of skills needed.” And how! With the OpenSCAD script, you only need the dimensions of your phone to generate the appropriate 3D printable case files, and the PCB side of things is simplified to ordering the relevant PCB components and uploading the current Fairberry v0.3.0 board design to a custom PCB service. Dakkaron uses JLCPCB for this.
They continue: “[The Fairberry] is probably as close to being able to order a ready-made part that I can get it to.”
You can check out the Fairberry project for yourself on GitHub, where you’ll find the bill of materials, source code, the case generation script, and detailed instructions for building one for yourself.
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License: The text of "This 3D Printable Mod Gives Your Android a Physical Keyboard" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.