Asking Questions and Getting Answers on a Claude-Enabled Typewriter

Using an AI like Claude certainly feels like living in the future — though it may be a somewhat dystopian future. But all of that LLM magic happens up in the cloud. Your computer or smartphone is only in the mix to give you a way to communicate with your artificial pal, almost like working on a glorified terminal. That’s why it was entirely possible for Ben James to integrate Claude into an old Brother AX-10 electric typewriter.

Like other electric typewriters from the era, this Brother AX-10 is really electronic. It reads keypresses just like your computer’s keyboard does, then tells the motorized paper feed and typing element how to move.

That operation enables two important features that were critical for this project: the ability to intercept key presses and the ability to inject key presses. James used an Arduino Nano board for both functions. It interfaces with the keyboard matrix through a set of four multiplexers: one each for columns and rows, for both input and output.

The Arduino communicates with a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer, which runs a Python script for sending prompts to the Claude API and receiving answers. The Arduino looks for key presses and sends them to the Raspberry Pi, which passes a prompt to Claude when it sees the Enter key. Once the Raspberry Pi gets a response, it sends the text back to the Arduino to simulate key presses.

The result is a fully typewritten log of conversations with Claude. Who needs Claude’s chat history function when you can maintain a filing cabinet full of those printed logs?