There are various situations that warrant additional keyboards on your desk, and inputting a second language is definitely a good one. That’s the idea behind KanaChord, which generates Unicode macros to render Japanese Kana characters using chords — pressing multiple keys at once as you would on a piano.
The Japanese writing system is made up of Kanji (Chinese characters), Hirigana, and Katakana. Without going into it too much, just know that Hirigana and Katakana are collectively known as the Kana, and there’s a table that lays out the pairing of vowels and consonants. To [Mac Cody], the layout of the Kana table inspired this chording keyboard.
One of the great features of KanaChord is that it uses color to indicate character type, Kana mode, and even provide error feedback. Another is the slide switch that selects one of three Unicode key sequences in order to support different computer platforms.
The red light means an invalid combination was pressed.
The brains of this operation is a Raspberry Pi Pico, an extremely popular choice for keyboards. [Mac Cody] used an Adafruit NeoKey 5×6 Ortho Snap-Apart keyboard PCB to make things easy, plus thirty Cherry MX switches of unknown color. The enclosure and the keycaps are 3D printed. There’s a wonderful amount of detail in the hardware section of the repo, so dig in.
Right now, KanaChord only outputs Kana Unicode and not Kanji Unicode, which gives an incomplete input system for Japanese as-is. Don’t worry — [Mac] is working on the KanaChord Plus Keyboard ..
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