I am writing this post from my new digital typewriter! It’s called the Micro Journal and it’s open source, designed by Un Kyu Lee!

I built it earlier this week, and I am already in love with it! I had been looking for a distraction-free writing device like the Freewrite or the AlphaSmart for a while, but never took the plunge because they were either too expensive, or… just not cute. I know aesthetics shouldn’t matter for a very practical device, but they really do, especially when it’s supposed to be distraction-free. You don’t want to be distracted by ugliness, heh. Anyway!

When I stumbled upon the open source project on the r/WriterDeck subreddit, it looked like the perfect combination of cute, and relatively inexpensive to put together. Plus, I had a lot of the parts already that I would need to build one!

The original creator Un Kyu Lee was a delight to chat to and work with. He printed the case and did the initial soldering, and then I took over with the rest!

The rest

When I say “the rest” I mean installing the battery, the switches, and the keycaps, making a keyboard configuration file, setting up a loading screen, setting up a Google Drive sync script, and flashing the latest firmware. It was a lot, but was easier than I expected it to be!

On GitHub, there’s a build guide that has all of the details you need, if you want to build one yourself. Because I’m a snob, I went a bit overboard on my keyboard customization.

I lubed up some NovelKeys NK Dry Black switches, and used DSS Tecla for the keycaps (which, in case you didn’t know, is a set I designed)!

I admit these steps took way longer than I anticipated. I had to take a razor to the plate to make sure the switches fit well, I had to fix some layout problems more than once… but overall, it was pretty smooth!

I spent quite a bit of time customizing and testing out my keymap until it felt natural to me. I’ve used orthogonal keyboard layouts before, but this one didn’t need most of the usual function keys, so my layers could be really intuitive! Here’s the map that I ended up with, in case you want to do something similar.

Once everything was physically finished, the only final steps were to flash the latest firmware, and set up the Google Drive script. Once again, I have to give kudos to Un Kyu Lee for making this so easy to do! The fact that it’s simply just adding some configuration to the SD card is a genuinely pleasant experience. I was able to make a little custom loading screen, change the background and foreground colors in the text editor itself… this little machine is now “done” and I couldn’t be happier with it!

Was it worth it?

Heck yes. I honestly wish I just bought one of these typewriters earlier. Not having anything to do but just write makes me work and think so much faster, I genuinely think that everyone should try this out who wants to write even a little more!

I might be drinking my own Kool-Aid on this, but I don’t care! This was such a fun project, and this simple (and powerful!) functionality I have now makes me want to gush about it all the time. Even having small sit-down sessions with it to brainstorm ideas is something I have really loved doing this week.

Anyway, one project from my never-ending pile of them is now COMPLETE!