Animated LED keyboard
posted Nov 18th 2008 1:34pm by Caleb Kraftfiled under: daily, led hacks, peripherals hacks
[Brian] made this really cool LED keyboard. He started with a Deck Legend Fire. When he got it, he realized that every key had its own LED, but the entire unit was either on, or off. He just couldn’t live with that and decided to start hacking into it to make each light individually controlled. He found a perfect empty space in the back of the keyboard and designed custom PCBs to control his lighting. he notes that he spent 12 hours of cutting and soldering wires to each of the lights in the keyboard, that doesn’t include the PCB construction.
In the end, he had a fantastic looking keyboard that had cool effects like heat mapping and idle animations. All stock features still work and it looks almost entirely stock. The only obvious difference is the fact that it has two USB cables coming out of it due to some issues with his KVM switch not detecting it.
Totally stunning! Really nice work!
This hack sure was worth the effort. The effect is great and offers more possibilities for playing around with the keyboard.
For example you could make light radiate from the key you just pressed and fading out across the other keys.
You could also use it to play games on the keyboard using the keyboard as a display (i just can’t imagine anything that would play good).
Extremely nice, one of the hacks i would consider doing myself.
Posted at 2:44 pm on Nov 18th, 2008 by Lupin