Cash Register Hotkey Board Is On The Money

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.

8 thoughts on “Cash Register Hotkey Board Is On The Money

  1. “[…] 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)

    1. 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. :)

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