This year’s Four Days in May at the Dayton Hamvention was full of sights to see. One amazing little piece of amateur engineering was Rich Meiss, WB9LPU’s “QuadraBug”, a mechanical key in the spirit of the Vibroplex Bug, but with fully automatic keying of both dits and dahs. (A bug has automatic dits, but manual dahs.)
Tom Perrera has put together a nice overview of Rich’s keys, starting from simple straight keys and working up to novel automatic keys like this.
My mechanical skills are limited. I have a lot of respect for those who can imagine and construct fine machines like this.