Google Japan built a conveyor belt keyboard and shared the plans

The design stacks four conveyor belts, each carrying 29 keys, for 116 keys in total. That’s more than a standard keyboard, partly because uppercase and lowercase letters have their own separate keys, so you never need to hold Shift. A motor turns the belts, and you wait for the letter you want to arrive, then press it.

Google Japan pitches it with a perfectly straight face as a breakthrough for one-handed or one-finger typing. Normal keyboards assume two hands, so typing with one means moving your arm and palm a lot. The solution, the team says, is for the keyboard to do the moving instead. That leaves your other hand free for a mouse, a cup of tea or, as the team suggests, a second conveyor belt keyboard.

The joke has a sting in its tail. Make a typo and you have to wait for the Backspace key to come back around.

The release date is part of the gag. Google Japan calls October 1 “Keyboard Day” because 10/1 echoes the common 101-key keyboard layout. Each year on that date, the team unveils a fully working answer to a problem nobody had.

The series started as April Fools’ jokes. The GitHub project that hosts the designs still describes them as previously known as the Gboard April Fools keyboards. Accounts differ on exactly when the switch to October happened, but the conveyor belt version is officially billed as the 15th entry in the series.

The ideas have stayed consistently odd. Past entries include a drum kit you play to type, a single-key Morse code keyboard, a keyboard you control by bending a metal spoon, a teacup with keys around the outside, a giant keycap-shaped hat you rotate on your head, a single long bar of keys in alphabetical order, a Möbius-strip keyboard with keys on both sides, and last year’s rotary phone dial. One joke even came true: years after the Morse code gag, Google really did add Morse code input to Gboard on Android.

You can’t buy one. Google says there are no plans to sell it, and the project page states plainly that it isn’t an official Google product. What you can do is build it. Google released the design as open source on GitHub, including:

• 3D-printable part files for the frame, rollers and belt links
• Firmware source code
• Circuit board files
• A step-by-step build guide, with a Japanese version

Be ready for a long project. The build guide lists 157 printed parts, although one early review of the parts list counted 154, and 116 of them are the small links that make up the belts. Each of those links gets its own key switch and keycap. You’ll also need a 3D printer, a way to press heat-set nuts into plastic, and patience for six assembly stages.

The published guide covers a motorized model whose belts turn and carry the keys around. A second version that connects over Bluetooth, which the guide describes as the model that can actually enter text, is listed as coming later. The guide doesn’t clearly say whether the motorized model can type into a computer.

Some documentation was also marked as still to come at launch, including the circuit and electronics notes, and the motor’s 150 RPM rating is about the only clue to how fast the keys move. If you want a working typist’s tool rather than a showpiece, it may be worth waiting for the Bluetooth model and fuller instructions.

Google Japan also has a list of tongue-in-cheek future upgrades “under consideration”: a high-speed mode, color options, a longer version for more characters and a shorter one for travel.

Nothing about the Gboard app on your phone changes. These keyboards exist to draw attention to Gboard, Google’s keyboard app, and to Japanese text input, a tricky problem because Japanese uses thousands of characters that don’t fit a normal layout.

Still, the series shows a side of Google that rarely gets attention now: engineers spending real time on beautifully built nonsense, then giving away the blueprints. For makers and students, the GitHub files are a genuine learning project in motors, firmware and 3D printing. And if you just want to type, Google’s own project page points you to the regular Gboard, the one where the keys stay put.