Four On The Floor For Your Virtual Race Car

July 17, 2020 by Al Williams 2 Comments

There was a time when building realistic simulations of vehicles was the stuff of NASA and big corporations. Today, many people have sophisticated virtual cockpits or race cars that they use with high-resolution screens or even virtual reality gear. If you think about it, a virtual car isn’t that hard to pull off. All you really need is a steering wheel, a few pedals, and a gear shifter. Sure, you can build fans to simulate the wind and put haptics in your seat, but really the input devices alone get you most of the way there. [Oli] decided he wanted a quick and easy USB gear shifter so he took a trip to the hardware store, picked up an arcade joystick, and tied it all together with an Arduino Leonardo. The finished product that you can see in the video below cost about $30 and took less than six hours to build.

The Leonardo, of course, has the ability to act like a USB human interface device (HID) so it can emulate a mouse or a keyboard or a joystick. That comes in handy for this project, as you would expect. The computer simply has to read the four joystick buttons and then decide which gear matches which buttons. For example up and to the left is first gear, while 4th gear is only the down button depressed. A custom-cut wooden shifter plate gives you the typical H pattern you expect from a stick shift.

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Reverse Engineering An RGB Keyboard Under Linux

April 14, 2020 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Hardware support under Linux is far better than it ever has been in the past. These days, most things “just work” out of the box, and you probably won’t have to compile any custom kernel modules. Certainly a far cry from where things were a decade ago. But that doesn’t mean everything will work to 100% of its abilities. Take for example, the Duck keyboard that [Cynthia Revström] has. Sure it works as a basic keyboard under any OS, but getting those fancy RGB LEDs working is another story entirely.

Don’t get the wrong idea here, [Cynthia] isn’t just trying to get the keyboard to flash along to music; the goal was to use the RGB lighting of the Ducky keyboard for notifications that the user can’t possibly ignore. Even the most laser-focused among us would have a hard time not noticing that the entire keyboard is blinking red. But the “DuckyRGB” software that you need to do something like that is Windows-only and apparently distributed via a sketchy Google Drive link. Yikes.

The first step to creating an alternative was to spin up a Windows VM and install DuckyRGB. From there, Wireshark could listen in between the virtual computer and the Ducky keyboard to see what the software was sending over the wire. After identifying a version number being sent in the clear, [Cynthia] was able to isolate the LED commands by searching for the hex color codes. From there, it was a relatively simple matter of writing some glue code to connect it up to an alert service and get notifications going.

There was only one problem; the keyboard didn’t work anymore. Turns out the tool that [Cynthia] wrote to control the keyboard’s LEDs was claiming the device so the kernel couldn’t access it for normal input. It took a detour with HIDAPI to get everyone playing together nicely, and now changing the color of your Ducky keyboard on Linux doesn’t turn it into a paperweight.

Even if you don’t have a Ducky keyboard, or aren’t particularly interested in having its LEDs blinked at you if you do, this project is a phenomenal example of practical USB reverse engineering. [Cynthia] says the inspiration for this project came from friend [Ben Cox], who’s write-up on creating USB userspace drivers we covered last year. If you’ve got and old USB gadget with Windows-only drivers, maybe it’s time you take a crack at unlocking it.

Emulating A Bluetooth Keyboard With The ESP32

February 13, 2020 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

Most people associate the ESP family of microcontrollers with WiFi, which makes sense as they’ve become the solution of choice for getting your project online quickly and easily. But while the WiFi capability might be the star of the show, the ESP32 also comes equipped with Bluetooth; we just don’t see people using it nearly as often. If you’re looking to get started using Bluetooth on the ESP32, then this simple wireless macro keypad from [Brian Lough] would be a great way to get started.

From a hardware standpoint, this project is incredibly straightforward. All you need to do is connect a membrane keypad up to the GPIO pins on the ESP32. Adding in a battery is a nice touch, and you probably would want to put it into a enclosure of some sort, but as a proof of concept it doesn’t get much easier than this. In this case [Brian] is using the TinyPICO board, but your personal ESP32 variant of choice will work just as well.

The rest of the project is all software, which [Brian] walks us through in the video after the break. There’s a preexisting library for Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) emulation on the ESP32, but it needs to be manually installed in the Arduino IDE. From there, he demonstrates how you can build up a functioning keyboard, including tricks such as sending multiple virtual keys at once.

In the past we’ve seen the ESP32 used to create a Bluetooth game controller, but the ability to emulate a keyboard obviously offers quite a bit more flexibility. With a practical demonstration of how easy as it is to turn this low-cost microcontroller into a wireless input device, hopefully we’ll start seeing more projects that utilize the capability.

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Arcade Buttons Make A Great Multimedia Keyboard

December 22, 2019 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

[Giovanni Bernardo] has a very important job – managing the audio for several Christmas events. Desiring a simple and effective control interface, he designed a dedicated media keyboard to run the show.

The project began with an Arduino Leonardo, commonly used in projects that aim to create a USB Human Interface Device. [Giovanni] then installed the HID-Project library from [Nicohood]. This was used to enable the device to emulate media buttons typically found on keyboards, something the standard Arduino HID libraries were unable to do. It’s a useful tool, and one that can be implemented on even standard Arduino Unos when used in combination with the HoodLoader2 bootloader.

For ease of use and a little bit of cool factor, arcade buttons were used for the media functions. Simple to wire up, cheap, and with a great tactile feel, they’re a popular choice for fun human interface projects. It’s all wrapped up in a neat plastic box with Dymo labels outlining the functions. It’s a neat and tidy build that should make running the Christmas show a cinch!

Accessibility Apps Get Help From Bluetooth Buttons

November 10, 2019 by Al Williams 4 Comments

Ever hear of Microsoft Soundscape? We hadn’t, either. But apparently it and similar apps like Blindsquare provide people with vision problems context about their surroundings. The app is made to run in the background of the user’s mobile device and respond to media controls, but if you are navigating around with a cane, getting to media controls on a phone or even a headset might not be very convenient. [Jazzang] set out to build buttons that could control apps like this that could be integrated with a cane or otherwise located in a convenient location.

There are four buttons of interest. Play/pause, Next, Back, and Home. There’s also a mute button and an additional button you can use with the phone’s accessibility settings. Each button has a special function for Soundscape. For example, Next will describe the point of interest in front of you. Soundscape runs on an iPhone so Bluetooth is the obvious choice for creating the buttons.

To simplify things, the project uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit board. Given that it’s Arduino compatible and provides a Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) out of the box, there’s almost nothing else to do for the hardware but wire up the switches and some pull up resistors. That would make the circuit easy to stick almost anywhere.

Software-wise, things aren’t too hard either. The library provides all the Bluetooth HID device trappings you need, and once that’s set up, it is pretty simple to send keys to the phone. This is a great example of how simple so many tasks have become due to the availability of abstractions that handle all of the details. Since a Bluetooth HID device is just a keyboard, you can probably think of many other uses for this setup with just small changes in the software.

We covered the Bluefruit back when it first appeared. We don’t know about mounting this to a cane, but we do remember something similar attached to a sword.

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Control Your Web Browser Like It’s 1969

July 23, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been tasked with developing a device for interfacing with a global network of interconnected devices. Would you purposely design a spring-loaded dial that can do nothing but switch a single set of contacts on and off from 1 to 10 times? What kind of crazy world would we have to live in where something like that was the pinnacle of technology?

Obviously, such a world once existed, and now that we’ve rolled the calendar ahead a half-century or so, both our networks and our interfaces have gotten more complex, if arguably better. But [Jan Derogee] thinks a step backward is on order, and so he built this rotary phone web browser. The idea is simple: pick up the handset and dial the IP address of the server you want to connect to. DNS? Bah, who needs it?

Of course there is the teensy issue that most websites can’t be directly accessed via IP address anymore, but fear not – [Jan] has an incredibly obfuscated solution to that. It relies on the fact that many numbers sound like common phrases when sounded out in Chinese, so there end up being a lot of websites that have number-based URLs. He provides an example using the number 517, which sounds a bit like “I want to eat,” to access the Chinese website of McDonald’s. How the number seven sounding like both “eat” and “wife” is resolved is left as an exercise to the reader.

And here we thought [Jan]’s rotary number pad was of questionable value. Still, we appreciate this build, and putting old phones back into service in any capacity is always appreciated.

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Giving An Industrial Push Button USB, Elegantly

April 3, 2019 by Donald Papp 37 Comments

[Glen]’s project sounds perfectly straightforward: have a big industrial-style push button act as a one-key USB keyboard. He could have hacked something together in any number of ways, but instead he decided to create a truly elegant solution. His custom PCB mates to the factory parts perfectly, and the USB cable between the button and the computer even fits through the button enclosure’s lead hole.

It turns out that industrial push buttons have standardized components which can be assembled in an almost LEGO-like manner, with components mixed and matched to provide different switch actions, light indicators, and things of that nature. [Glen] decided to leverage this feature to make his custom PCB (the same design used in his one-key keyboard project) fit just like a factory component. With a 3D printed adapter, the PCB locks in just like any other component, and even lines up with the lead hole in the button’s enclosure for easy connecting of the USB cable.

What does [Glen] use the big button for? Currently he has two applications: one provides a simple, one-button screen lock on a Linux box running a virtual machine at his place of work. It first disengages the keyboard capture of the virtual machine, then engages the screen lock on the host. The other inserts a poop emoji into Microsoft documents. Code and PCB design files for [Glen]’s small keyboards are available on GitHub.