Media keyboards are nice in theory. But in practice they never have all the keys you want, and they almost always have a few you don’t. Sure, you could maybe reassign the ones you don’t use, but then the caps are wrong, and it’s a whole thing. So really, the only winning move is to make a micro macro keyboard as [littleSilvr] did to make all your shortcuts one-button accessible.
This lovely input has an Arduino Pro Micro for a brain, and Gateron browns for brawn. That knob there is a rotary encoder, not a potentiometer, because endless volume knob twiddling is just so much nicer. In case you’re wondering, those shortcuts open Fusion 360 and Cura, but we’re still not sure what the hyphen does.
Can we talk about those keycaps, though? [littleSilvr] used [Make Anything]’s process of of printing in multi-color with a single extruder. The technique involves building a vector for each color, each of which gets its own STL file. Then you add retraction as you go up through the layers, slow the print speed, change filament colors while the nozzle and bed are still warm, and voila, a vibrant canvas of colors.
If you don’t have a printer and you don’t mind a bit of compromise on the number of inputs, try basing your build on an existing input, like an old rotary telephone dialer.
Via r/duino
“but we’re still not sure what the hyphen does.”
OP answered on the reddit post: it minimizes all windows on screen at once.
I suppose a big red emergency stop–while accurate–isn’t subtle enough for that action.
A.K.A. the boss button. (c:
I saw all the resistors and thought that they were an attempt at nkey rollover but they’re actually pulldowns to prevent voltage floating. the circuit could be simplified a bit by using the internal pullups, but i like how there wasn’t an unnecessary matrix scan implemented like the romac and so many others do.
Fritzing in all it’s glory! Hurray!
Someone made a media keyboard from an old Sony Videomixer (BKDS 2010).
https://ibb.co/gFSBPYr
They are nice, havin a red-white-led inside.
what’s the top-left key for?
shortcut to porn channel?
uh, top right, of course
though, looking closely…
It’s a rotary knob to adjust volume, says so right in the article.
This is great, Im always on the lookout for simple interfaces for the elderly. Tactile buttons seems to be more easily manageable as they get older over touch screens.
The link for the Onedrive link to the project info seems to be dead and a link to “[Make Anything]’s process of of printing in multi-color with a single extruder” would be appreciated ;)