JoyBoard

Inspiration

I suck at typing I really hate typing on touchscreens. I make a lot of errors and spellcheck does nothing for me. This makes typing on my phone super slow. We wanted a better keyboard for a touchscreen, one that replaces the outdated qwerty/dvorak style that was made for physical switches.

What it does

Typing for thumbs The software interprets actions from the joysticks as different characters, picked and organized among the more frequently used characters of the ASCII character table. This allows an efficient and accurate typing experience.

How we built it

Android Studio. This was a first for all of us on the team. We all have had experience with Java, but never had used the Android API for coding, nor android emulators. This was a challenge as we spent most our first twelve hours trying to figure out how to start writing code. From there, with some awesome support from our mentors, we managed to pull together a pretty simple demo of this keyboard.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first hackathon, both for each of us individually and as a team. We spent a while weighing the pros and cons of our initial project ideas, wanting to hit that sweet spot between useful and obscenely difficult. We definitely did not anticipate the installation of software to take so long. We actually started coding really early this morning. We found our niches of the project relatively well, but some members did not have a specific role and found themselves as more of a role to support others. We also probably should have asked for help sooner than we did regarding the technical side of setting up how to code on a different platform from what we're all used to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We worked together well through enough communication and note-taking. We also tried something completely new for most of us (coding for Android), and we were able to use our previous knowledge of coding to build something new. Speaking of building something new, we came up with our idea and planned for it within the time allotted for coding. We are proud that we could come up with something new and unique and possibly useful.

What we learned

We learned that we probably should plan more before future hackathons.

What's next for JoyBoard

We will add more complete functionality to JoyBoard because some important features are lacking. However, since we now have more skills in coding for Android, the process will seem significantly expedited from our experience in this hackathon. There is definitely a steep learning curve in using this keyboard, and even we were unable to type up to our normal WPM using it in these few hours. However, with some better labeling, this should be much easier and even intuitive to use.