DUET

A Purpose-Built Tester

Designed to overcome the challenges of displaying switches at meetup vendor booths and similar events.

The tester is designed for two of each switch - one with a keycap installed for type-testing, and another without a keycap for visual presentation.
With a 54-switch-types capacity, a large variety of switches can be presented in a unit the size of roughly one keyboard.

The tester is a fully functional keyboard inside - in the example of the use case above, the PCB is configured to send two keystrokes corresponding to the row and column of the key pressed.
This is received by a display of choice - for example a full-screen webapp running on a tablet that displays the corresponding switch’s information.

In the example kiosk frontend implementation linked above, a full-screen React app cycles through general keyboard photos when idle, and displays the corresponding switch info for several seconds when pressed.
(Long-press the logo in the idle screen, configure the upper left switch, then type a coordinate such as “a0” to see it in action.)

This removes the need for piles of printed description cards, saving limited table space at a meetup vendor booth and simplifying booth preparation.