Glyphs devlog #1

—Hello again proggers—

New project, new devlog series. Glyphs is a multi-purpose steno keyboard, built off the Hackpad project. Just wrapped the refresher on it, and it was genuinely peak. Forgot how much I loved PCB design until this exact moment.

turns out the love was never gone, just dormant

Cat or dog? KiCad

Okay let’s get into it~

—Yap—

Starting point for Glyphs: take Hackpad as the base and build a real multi-purpose steno keyboard out of it. First step was refreshing on the fundamentals before touching the actual board, and that refresher alone was enough to remember why PCB work is fun in the first place.

—The Great Suffering—

1 — The Hackpad Refresher

Went back through Hackpad to get reoriented before diving into Glyphs proper. Not glamorous, but necessary — steno layouts and multi-purpose input aren’t things you want to wing without a solid base understanding first.

2 — Remembering Why PCB Design Rules

Somewhere in the refresher it clicked again — the actual process of laying out a board, routing traces, all of it. Easy to forget how satisfying that is when you’ve been heads-down in software for a while.

software’s fine but there’s nothing quite like watching traces route

—FAQ (no one asked these but they are here)—

Q: What is a “progger”?
A: A human programmer. You. Except this devlog series is mostly hardware, so maybe “progger” needs a hardware cousin term.

Q: What is Glyphs?
A: A multi-purpose steno keyboard, building on the Hackpad project as its base.

Q: What’s a steno keyboard?
A: A keyboard designed around chorded input for stenography-style typing rather than one key per character.

Q: Is this replacing any of the software projects (Spectralis, Command, EDITH)?
A: No, separate track entirely. This is hardware.

Q: What’s next for Glyphs?
A: Presumably moving from refresher territory into actual board design for the real project. Ask devlog #2.

—This is the end*—

*end for now, trace routing permitting

PINEAPPLE!!!