The Thing That Goes CLACK and Ding Is the Mechanical Keyboard Accessory You Never Knew You Wanted
If you thought Cherry MX Blues were noisy, this Teensy 4.1-powered accessory will have you running for the silence of the hills.
Controls engineer Don Kiser has decided that mechanical keyboards just aren't noisy enough, and set about building a device to address that very problem — creating The Thing That Goes CLACK and Ding.
"I like mechanical keyboards," Kiser explains, referring to the devices, popular among typists and typically hated by anyone with whom they have to share an office, which use often-clicky mechanical key switches in place of a quieter but mushier membrane, "and my coworkers joked my current keyboard wasn't loud enough. So, I made the clacker."
The Clacker is a box housing a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller board and designed to sit between any USB keyboard and the host machine. The Teensy is given the job of intercepting each key press as it happens, and then fires a chunky solenoid to physically thwack a wooden block — creating a satisfying thunk considerably louder than the click of the real key switch.
"Why? Well, why not," Kiser asks. "Sure, I could go buy and 5251 wire it up to run on mains power and have a real solenoid but that would get me fired. So, this got my point across and now mechanical keyboards are a thing at work."
The device has another couple of tricks up its sleeve, too, beyond simply hitting a block of wood. Inspired by the carriage return bell of traditional keyboards, a press of the Enter or Return key leaves the wooden block alone and instead rings a bell — while hitting Caps Lock plays the Super Mario Bros. mushroom-growth sound when enabled then its shrinking counterpart when disabled.
Kiser isn't the only one to desire a little more meat from the sound of a mechanical keyboard: in March last year Ming-Gih Lam showed off the Red Herring Solenoid Edition, a custom split-layout mechanical keyboard which — as the name implies — included a solenoid triggered on key press. A control system allowed the volume of the resulting hit to be adjusted — or disabled entirely for quiet typing.
A full write-up and parts list is available on Kiser's Hackaday.io page.