Been giving the idea of having separate keyboards for each hand some serious thought - especially with a view to having them mounted on the arms of a nice comfortable chair, perhaps even a recliner, so I can rest my own arms comfortably and have the keys under my fingertips.
All the commercial keyboards I have seen that can be separated to that degree are way more expensive than this Kiwi is prepared to pay (or capable of paying) and so I've been thinking about how I can make the system myself on a shoe-string budget. This, naturally, leads to some logistical nightmares given my starting point is bound to be a couple of relatively inexpensive "standard" keyboards to supply the appropriate halves of the boards.
Has anyone here tried making their own DIY split/separated keyboards or at least thought of some of the logistics of it?
One version I saw used membrane/rubber dome keyboards and just masked up the half of the membrane that was not required and folded it under the backing plate out of the way. It looked pretty crude but seemed to work OK.
I know from having two USB keyboards plugged into the same computer at work (a standard keyboard for others to use as well as my own "lightly hacked" compact keyboard) that pressing the caps lock or numlock on one affects both.
This tells me that if each of the halves had their own controller board they could both be plugged into the same computer and work in concert, supplying the scan codes for their respective keys, while the one that has the caps lock button set up will affect both boards.
Where it gets untidy is the fact that I tend to use my left hand to work the cursor control keys (usually to move between cells in a spreadsheet) while I use my right hand to enter numbers on the number pad. Even on my compact keyboard, the cursor control keys are on the right of the board, which means if I merely butcher two keyboards to get the left and right sections, the cursor control keys are going to be on the right-hand segment, far from my left hand.
Any thoughts (aside from the obvious ones regarding me being a lunatic)?