After his outpour of encouragement, I was motivated to create a solution, no matter how hard. I had a rough idea in my mind, but it was going to be tough oh who am I kidding, it’s five buttons connected to a microcontroller, it would take two minutes.

It took four hours. Close enough.

The hardware

Behold.
As I said, the hardware is simple enough: Just a microcontroller and five keyboard switches wired to five of its input pins. Since this build //

Deciding which key presses would correspond to which characters was the hardest part, but also the most creative. Since this is a brand-new keyboard layout, I would not be beholden to the mistakes of the past. No more jamming typewriters for me, no more bigrams, I would have free rein to perform extensive research and decide what the optimal correspondence would be for my layout.

I decided that that was too much work, and that I’d just fall back to the good old etaoin shrdlu. I found the character frequencies in the English language, and made sure that each of the five most frequently used characters (the spacebar, “e”, “t”, etc) had its own key. After that, the next most frequent characters got a double press (the thumb plus one of the four others). Then came double presses between the other keys, then triple presses, etc.