When presented with a pile of free electronics, sometimes you grab things for their ‘someday’ potential. Other times, you know exactly what you’re after. [Bryce] got a big old cash register for free from school because they’ve moved on to using Square or something. He scored two VFDs and a solenoid as a side effect, but he was really after that sturdy keypad and its paper-label keycaps, ripe for customization.
Two hours of reverse engineering later, he knew where the button presses were going well enough to reach for a knockoff Arduino Pro Micro and a couple of shift registers. [Bryce] wanted his hotkey-board to handle keyboard presses as well as media key input, so he went with the HID-Project library over the standard-issue Arduino version. Of course, the whole point of making your own hotkey-board is customization. For [Bryce], that means Word shortcuts and quick access to Greek letters for all those engineering reports he must write. Dig that Half-Life lambda!
What? You don’t have access to free electronics? You could make a hotkey-board out of arcade buttons. Those things can really take a beating.
Thanks for the writeup Kristina!
That’s such a great idea, that would work great for custom machine controllers too. Thanks for the idea.
Bryce, thanks foe docuemnting your work in writing, instead of yet another youtube video (YAYV?) Much easier to browse than a video, nice job!
Thank you for the kind words. :)
“[…] Word shortcuts and quick access to Greek letters […]”
… well I just throw in some casual LaTeX here…
and if you really desperate to use Word, not everybody knows it’s formula thingy actually speaks a LaTeX subset…so \sqrt(2\pi\omega) makes √(2πω)
I’ve never used LaTeX, but maybe it’s time to try it! I didn’t know about the \alpha formula trick within Word, thanks for the tip.
Nice, but α-β-δ-γ is surprisingly disturbing!
Have you heard of the qwerty keyboard? ;)
I wanted to have both uppercase and lowercase delta on the same line, and since they’re between gamma and lambda, I had to make compromises! I also put theta and phi together since they’re both angles. Other than that, I tried to respect the greek alphabet order. :)