Authiik Input Technology

## Keyboards

   A modern Ukitii keyboard was designed to be used with authiik desktop computers and further descended from electric typewriters, resulting in the modern layouts commonly used today.

Similarly to human "QWERTY" keyboards, which are still largely standard in both ANSI and ISO forms to this day aside from some still using the alternative Dvorak and Colemak layouts or ortholinear arrangements, the older staggered layouts had their origins in mechanical typewriters, which required the use of staggered keys to prevent the internal components of the machine from colliding and lessening the risk of jams.

The advent of keyboards with discrete keys that bridged and broke connections on a circuit board, discrete switches, or a membrane beneath the keys allowed some flexibility with how exactly keyboards could be arranged. The introduction of Ukitii to the world only furthered this experimentation. They remained in use from the date of their invention to the modern day, with not only devices produced by the authiik utilizing them, but devices made by humans for the authiik.

Authiik keyboard layouts are mirrored from the human standard, with the delete/backspace and return keys on the left side, and the escape or abort key in the top right. A true enter key has been retained in addition to the "carriage return" key, whose name translates to "next", which serve different purposes.

## VizvayuTanta Capacitive Keyswitches

An internal Diagram of an VizvayuTanta Medium-Clicky Keyswitch

### Key Travel

1.7 mm (Tactile Event)1.8 mm (Actuation)

3.0 mm (Bottom Out)

### Parts

Return SpringSlider

Plunger

Spacing Foam/Spring

Clickbar (Optional)

Fixing Pin (Optional)

Impact Surface (Optional)

An isolated VizvayuTanta medium-clicky "pink" switch being actuated.

VizvayuTanta's keyswitches are meant to be modular and customizable, partially to save cost, but also to be able to OEM keyboards to a system integrator's specifications.

It uses an interchangeable four-part mechanism set into a metal or plastic barrel plate (4). This includes an external return spring (2), a slider (3), a plunger (5), and a spacer (6) that is either composed of foam or a smaller, lighter coil spring.

If a clicky or tactile switch is built, a three-part assembly is added to the underside of the barrel plate, including a clickbar (7) pushed outwards by a diagonal surface on the slider, a pin for it to be fixed to (8), and a surface for it to impact against. For a sharp click, this can be metal or plastic, and for a soft and quiet bump, this is made of a dense foam or rubber.

The plunger is capped at the bottom with a graphite pad (9) that contacts the PCB beneath the barrel plate to signal to the keyboard controller what keys are currently pressed.

There are nine standard combinations of parts, with different return spring weightings ranging from 35 to 70 grams, with or without clickbar, and soft or hard impact surfaces. These are color-coded according to slider color. For example, a medium-clicky switch, with a 50 gram actuation weight and hard clicker impact surface, is referred to as "VizvayuTanta Pink" due to its pink slider.

Clicky switches use rose, pink, and purple sliders, with the light color representing a 35 gram spring, the middle color representing a 50 gram spring, and the darker color representing a 70 gram spring. Linear switches are cream, yellow, and red respectively, and tactile switches are sky, blue, and navy.

When pressing a key, the tactile event occurs at 1.7 millimeters, which is intended to thrust the key past the the plunger contact at 1.8 millimeters, and the key bottoms out at 3 millimeters. This bottom-out distance can be altered by shortening the slider and plunger, or by lengthening the slider. Some OEM models produced for other companies, such as Maya, used a 3.66 millimeter bottom-out depth.

These keyboards, especially clicky and tactile models, were well-loved by typists for their positive and very sharp tactility allowing for precise feedback about when a key has actuated and enabling a relaxed typing style.

## Muxiya Foam and Foil Switch

### Parts

Return SpringSlider

Pad

An isolated Muxiya Foam and Foil switch being actuated.

The Muxiya incarnation of the Foam and Foil keyswitch was similar to the linear VizvayuTanta switch, but was far simpler and cheaper.

Instead of using a complex slider and barrel plate design with angled surfaces and cutouts for modularity and customizability, it was a simple cylindrical slider (4) with a flat surface for indexing that flared out into a section with clips for holding the foam disk that contacted the PCB. This foam (6) had a plastic disk side (5) that clipped into the slider, and a metal foil side (7) that pressed capacitive pads for sending the signals to the keyboard. It was forced upwards by a It used an external coil spring (2) made up of square wire.

The switches had four millimeters of travel, and the disk contacted the PCB after two millimeters. The softness of the foam allows for the two millimeters of overtravel, but causes a squishy, spongy feeling that is far more pronounced than that caused by VizvayuTanta foam plunger spacers.

This is mostly due to the fact that the foam pad has close to two millimeters of compression distance, while the smaller piece of foam or spring in the VizvayuTanta switch has only 1.2 millimeters. The long travel pressing on foam does, however, lead to a very quiet keypress, and as a result they were well-loved for office environments where disturbing neighbors was a concern. That is, until the cheaper and quieter rubber dome mechanisms grew in popularity.

Its switch feel is described as linear in early documentation, but modern users describe it as being exponential, as the force curve increases sharply after the foam contacts the sensing assembly giving it a distinct two-stage feel. An initial light weighting that dramatically stiffens halfway down.

## Maya Tactile Foam and Foil

### Parts

SleeveSlider

Pad

A Maya Foam and Foil switch being actuated.

Maya's Foam and Foil switches were used in early laptops as a slimmer alternative to full-travel tactile keyboards that they were licensing from VizvayuTanta.

It operates using the same principle as a Muxiya Foam and Foil switch, with a slider (3), a foam pad (5) with a hard plastic and metal foil disk (6, 7) on opposite sides, and a buckling rubber sleeve return element (2) providing resistance to being pressed and a soft tactility. However, it only had 1.53mm of key travel, actuating roughly two thirds of the way down, and was inherently dampened on the downstroke thanks to the rubber resting between the keycap (1) and the barrel unit (4).

The switches were isolated from one another, with individual barrels clipped into a mounting plate above the sensing assembly. Early in the history of these switches' service lives, the sensing assembly was a PCB much like the rest of the existing capacitive switches, but this was later swapped for a plastic membrane printed with capacitive ink pads to save on costs, thickness, and weight.

They were considered poor switches by most who tried them, but as one of the only mechanisms for low-profile keyboards available during their introduction, most simply put up with their existence due to their small size.

The introduction of the rubber dome switch essentially made these obsolete, as the "mechanism" could be scaled up and down arbitrarily to match size requirements within a wide range of key travel depths.

### Early Proprietary Layouts

#### Muxiya Abiya Extended Terminal Layout

The Extended Terminal layout is best known for appearing on the Abiya 314 keyboard, which was paired with the Abiya 310. Its alphanumeric and symbols block was mostly identical to the standard keyboard that was later included with the a320. Instead of Option 1, 2, and 3 keys, it featured two Option keys and an indent key.

Its navigation cluster was entirely normal for the Muxiya keyboard range, and it had a standard set of five function keys and a power key for activating and deactivating the terminal and monitor it was connected to, but its standout features were its integrated calculator and special function keys.

Its calculator was integrated into the number pad, a 19-key arrangement with math symbols for division, multiplication, subtraction, and addition, percentages, square roots, a fraction separator, space key, triple zero key, and an execute key. Its extra key when compared to other calculators and 18-key numpads was a send key.

Pressing this send key put the keyboard into a mode where it would perform the math you had typed, and upon turning off send mode by pressing the key a second time, would print the result on screen at the cursor's location. For instance, the sequence "Send > 2 > + > 2 > Send" would output the number four.

Its function row had keys dedicated to various shortcuts that were used in MaUVaKeh. The first of these groups included a duplicate delete key for use with the calculator, a "Stop" key used to stop a text mode program from drawing text and return the user to a command prompt, a "Pause" key that simply stops the program from drawing more text until it its pressed a second time, and a program swap key. This will cycle through the different programs running on a machine. If, for instance, a user needed information from a text document for use in a spreadsheet, then they could copy the information needed and swap back to their spreadsheet program to insert it where needed.

The second group included an insert key, also called "Write Over", which would replace text ahead of the cursor as one typed instead of displacing it, "Erase", which deleted the character in front of the cursor instead of behind it, "Delete Line", which cleared the current line of text when pressed twice in quick succession, and the page break key, which placed the cursor at the beginning of the next page of text rather than continuing on the current one.

The last group of four included a "Clear" key, which erased all text on screen and returned the user to a simple command prompt, and the final three were the common cut, copy, and paste commands. Cut and copy function similarly, where one removes the original and one does not, and paste inserts whatever was last cut or copied.

#### Muxiya Abiya Compact Keyboard

The Muxiya Abiya 331, 332, and 3311 were keyboards that were included within the Abiya 330 product family. It resembles its contemporary Muxiya 140 arrangement, but it featured two more character keys. A quotation mark and a fraction separator key.

On the left side of the board is the navigation block, which includes screen scrolling keys for all four directions and a diamond-shaped arrow key cluster. Rather than using wider keycaps with stabilizers, keys wider than 1 unit other than the spacebar are stepped to provide a 1 unit pressing surface.

To the left of the input keys is the delete key, the cursor left key (which serves the same purpose as pick left or left select found on other keyboards), the return/next key, and options 1, 2, and 3.

On the right side of the input keys are the abort key, the cursor right key (identical to pick right or right select), home and end keys to move the cursor to the beginning or end of the current line of text, the execute key (identical to confirm or enter) and the three function keys.

#### Muxiya 140 Microcomputer

The Muxiya 140 Microcomputer's keyboard was based on the Muxiya Compact Keyboard that was intended for their ShiiKaVi computers. It included a total of 56 keys in a semi-staggered arrangement, with keys in rows 1 and 3 aligned with one another, and rows 2 and 4 aligned with one another, but shifted over 1/4th of one square key width, or "unit", to the right.

Its placement of the symbol keys and modifier keys was different to the placement made standard by Maya's M170/7 keyboard. To the left of the input keys is the delete key, option 1, up and down cursor keys, return/next, and option 2. To the right is abort, enter/confirm, left and right cursor keys, option 3, and the three dedicated function keys.

#### VizvayuTanta 140k Microcomputer

The VizvayuTanta 78-key layout was used on VizvayuTanta's 12-bit and early 24-bit home microcomputers. It was ortholinear like Maya's microcomputer keyboards, had a similar symbol key arrangement to Muxiya's keyboard layout, and a totally foreign modifier key arrangement. What was unique about it was its numpad and arrow keys, one of the first to feature a diamond arrangement despite its unfamiliar arrangement of the number keys, where a 2x4 arrangement like what was found on Maya's later 69 and 81-key layouts was typically preferred.

To the left of the input keys was three keys, the "pick left" key, which served only to move the selection "back" in a list of options or buttons. The indent key, labeled "Tab" in the above diagram, was used exclusively for creating an indent at the top of paragraphs which, while not necessary in Ukitii, was sometimes used in literature as a way to make text more legible and to save space, an alternative to paragraph breaks. Below them was a large 1.5x2 unit return/next line key which would later become standard.

To the right were six keys. The first was a "pick right" key, which moved a selection "forward" in a list or group of buttons. The second was the confirm/enter key, and below them was a block of modifier keys, alts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Above the keyboard was the function row and the abort and delete keys. Unusual for an ukitii keyboard, the abort key was placed on the left side and separate from the alphanumeric block. Delete was beside it, separated from it with a 0.5 unit wide spacer integrated into the barrel plate. Continuing to the right, seven individual function keys filled out the rest of the space to the right edge of the keyboard.

#### Maya ShM170/7 Microcomputer Keyboard

The Maya 170/7 is quite influential as it serves as the basis for most modern keyboard layouts. The symbol keys flank the character keys in such a way to place the letters in the middle of the main block to facilitate touch typing. Five columns of keys are intended to be used by each of the authiik's three fingers, leaving the spacebar to be pressed by the thumbs.

Its modifier keys are slightly different from modern keyboards. For one, the return/next key is only 1.5 units wide and 1 unit deep, instead of the 2 unit deep return/next key that came from VizvayuTanta keyboards. Alt 1 takes up the space it would if it had been deeper. Alt 2 and Alt 3 flank the spacebar.

Modern keyboards place these keys in a line and duplicate them on either side of the spacebar, and feature a 1.5x2 return/next key.

The block to the left contains a square-shaped navigation cluster and six function keys.

### ShiiKaVi Standard Keyboard Layouts

#### 54 and 56-Key Layouts

    The 54-key layout is often used for compact and travel keyboards. It features 12 non-entry keys, including two instances of three different modifier keys labeled "1 Change", "2 Change", and "3 Change", which are often equated to control, option, and alternative on modern BluOS keyboards, however there is no capitalization in Ukitii leaving no real equivalent to the shift key. There are left and right select keys, equivalent to tab and shift+tab, delete, abort, equivalent to "escape", next, equivalent to "return", and confirm, equivalent to "enter".

There are 11 dual-purpose symbol keys, and finally, the core of the keyboard is the 32 alphanumeric keys divided into four categories. 8 digit keys, 14 consonant keys, 7 vowel keys, and 3 nonverbal character keys.

The 56-Key keyboard is similar to the 54-key, however it replaces the two leftmost alt keys with an arrow cluster.

#### 74-Key Layout

The 74-Key Ukitii keyboard has all of the functionality of a 54-key keyboard, but adds a suite of other functions including a full-size set of arrow keys, back and front keys (equivalent to "home" and "end", bringing the cursor to the front or back of the current line), and keys to allow both vertical and horizontal scrolling. This is also the first keyboard layout to feature 10 dedicated function keys on its left side which are bound to specific actions within programs. They are often used in combination with an alt key to control features of the computer on which it is being used. Common examples include changing the output and input volume, display brightness, or switching between multiple work spaces or desktops. These features are often accessed on a 54-Key layout via an alt+number key combination

#### 91-Key Layout

    The 91-Key keyboard is the full-size keyboard designed for use with Muxiya's ShiiKaVi operating system. It has all keys present on the 74-key, as well as two additional function keys and a 15-key number pad, which is preferred for data entry applications and makes them popular in professional settings.

### Maya Vision Keyboard Layouts

#### Maya 69-Key Layout

Maya's 69-key keyboard was packaged exclusively with Maya branded computer products. It uses different translations of the words for the abort and confirm keys than standard key legends, and has a different layout.

The primary alphanumeric block features 55 keys, with the option 1 and 2 keys joined by a Maya logo key to the right of the space bar. To the left of the space bar are the arrow keys in a 4x1-key arrangement. The left and right arrow keys are on opposing sides of the group and flanking the up and down keys, which are side-by-side.

On the extreme left edge of the keyboard, the 3x5-key number pad can be found, with a layout not unlike the common authiik octal calculator. The eight numerals are arranged vertically in a 2x4-key grid, with five mathematical symbols in a column on the left. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, and a fraction separator.

#### Maya 81-Key Pro Keyboard

The Maya Pro keyboard adds eight function keys, line front, and line back (or home and end) keys to the 69-key Maya standard keyboard. They aren't strictly necessary except in specific applications that have special functions assigned to them, though many include multiple sets of key bindings so which keyboard is used is largely up to preference.

### General-Use Keyboards

#### 66-Key Layout

    The 66-Key Ukitii keyboards have mostly appeared on laptops built by humans for authiik living on Temno. They feature the function keys from the 74-key, laid out in either a 2x5 block of 1x1 keys on the left side or a row of half-height keys sharing a row with the number keys. The former is typically preferred. The most common seen in the hands of authiik, however is that designed by Range-L.

The Range-L Variant of the 66-Key keyboard is identical to a 56 key keyboard, but with 10 function keys in a column on the left side of the board, and an Alt 4 key instead of a second Alt 1 key.

#### 28-Key Touch Keyboard

    Small-form touch keyboards only have 28 character keys and a period key on their first page. The symbols key cycles through pages of other symbols that may also be typed, allowing access to numbers and further punctuation marks.

#### 89-Key Layout

    The 89-key keyboard is a compact alternative to the 91-Key. It features nearly all of the keys present on the 91-Key, but lacks the scroll keys for left and right. The purpose was to create a keyboard with a smaller horizontal footprint than the 74-key, but the same functionality as the 91-key.

#### 88-Key Layout

    The 88-Key layout is nearly identical to the 89-Key layout, but the "double zero" key has been removed to allow for an "inverted T" arrow key cluster and a 1x2 confirm key on the number pad. Whether an individual pursues an 88 or 89-Key layout is largely up to personal preference, though many choose the 88-key for its more natural inverted-T arrow cluster.

#### 61-Key Multipurpose Layout

The 61-key layout is a human keyboard with secondary printed legends that correspond to authiik key inputs. Its layout when in standard Martian/Anglic input mode is relatively normal for such a small form-factor of human keyboard aside from its uniform quarter-unit key staggering as opposed to an alternating quarter/half unit pattern standard to human keyboards, with a function layer to allow access to navigation commands and the function keys that would otherwise have their own keys on a larger board.

The Ukitii Lock key to the right of the space bar and alt legends key puts it into an Ukitii input mode causing forty-one keys to become equivalent to those on an Ukitii keyboard. Modifier keys are marked with the names of their Ukitii equivalents but do not change functions. For instance, the Return key is labeled "Kamii", which is the key used to create a new line of text below the current one. The "Narakiida", or "confirm" key, is accessed by holding the AltGr key and pressing Return.

The fact that the modifier keys do not change positions in Ukitii lock is also one of the most common complaints about the layout from authiik, as the layout of those keys is reversed when compared to a normal Ukitii keyboard.

Ukitii legends are often colored lilac to distinguish them from the function layer in blue, and the alternate legends for martian in green. Caps lock, Ukitii lock, AltGr lock, and scroll lock lights appear in the lower right corner.

These keyboards are often seen in places where both languages are in common use and the workflow would be improved by not relying on translation software.