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cafebeentoday at 3:47 PM2 repliesview on HN

Yes, agreed. Beautiful keyboard, but when I heard "magic" I hoped to find a touch ID. That sensor so useful that even though I use a mechanical keyboard, I keep an apple magic keyboard off to the side of my desk just for the touch ID sensor.

What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked by Apple's IP on the device, so I've considered just hacking one together by deconstructing and extracting an Apple keyboard...


Replies

dbalaterotoday at 6:24 PM

I've built a few boxes:

https://www.printables.com/model/355924-clickable-touch-id-b...

https://gist.github.com/KhaosT/1406a6b6bea38f59e059c2afcb39d...

You have to carefully tear down and extract the touch id sensor, and then remount it in a box. I went the battery route so it could stay wireless. The tradeoff is the box is bigger.

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xp84today at 5:38 PM

Some people I know just velcro a Magic Keyboard to the bottom of their desktop for this reason.

So frustrating that Apple won't sell just a button even at any price. Gotta buy their terrible keyboard for $150 to get that. eyeroll