Driving USB peripherals with Arduino
posted Oct 22nd 2009 10:44am by Mike Szczysfiled under: arduino hacks
Circuits@Home have managed to host a USB keyboard with an Arduino and display the keyboard inputs on a character LCD. This uses the USB host shield we covered in August. That host shield includes a MAX3421 which is used here to drive the character LCD.
The control code for the keyboard ends up being fairly simple. The keyboard is polled for entries. The HID input is then examined and converted to ASCII codes for use with the LCD screen. This could make for an excellent controller or debugger for embedded systems. The Arduino, shield, and LCD could be integrated into the keyboard itself with an I/O port for connecting to your project. Commands can be typed out and sent through the I/O port when enter is pressed, with feedback displayed on the screen.
The example code provided with this project lays out the framework for hosting peripherals. We’re looking forward to more projects, and code libraries that take advantage of this new functionality.
Yeah that is brilliant. I have been watching that but had not noticed that the keyboard code had appeared.
A board is on my list. I have 40×4 LCD that I am hopefully going to implement into a keyboard to mimic those extortionately priced gaming ones you can get.