I’ve always wanted the mechanical keyboard crowd to stretch further. Where is the keyboard made of pipes and water? Made of plants? The air keyboard that uses LED sensors and light to type? Keyboard gloves? An old typewriter turned into a modern keyboard?
A lot of this stuff is done in the raspberry pie or arduino crowds.
The community has done some stuff like this (the typewriter conversions especially, though they are rare due to difficulty) and there’s a lot of crossover between the mechanical keyboard crowds and rpi/Arduino crowds.
The problem is that gimmick projects are well-suited for rpi/Arduino. These projects rarely are solving a real need so practicalities are ephemeral. These sorts of wild projects are driven at least partially by a desire for recognition within the community for pursuing them.
But everyone knows what a keyboard is used for. Radical ideas are fun except everyone at the end of the day still needs to type and knows not to get to excited about crazy concepts. This includes the people who are thinking about making the crazy concepts. So we get keyboards with RGB and encoder knobs and layouts and OLED screens and quick detach cables other fun additions/modifications which don’t fundamentally change the core of how the keyboard executes.
A lot of this stuff is done in the raspberry pie or arduino crowds.