The mechanical keyboard rabbit hole is a deep one, and can swallow up as much money and time as you want to spend. If you’ve become spoiled on the touch and responsiveness of a Cherry MX or other mechanical switch, you might even start putting them on other user interfaces as well, such as this Logitech joystick that now sports a few very usable mechanical keys for the touch-conscious among us.
The Logitech Extreme 3D Pro that [ErkHal] and friend [HeKeKe] modified to accept the mechanical keys originally had a set of input buttons on the side, but these were unreliable and error-prone with a very long, inconsistent push. Soldering some mechanical switches directly on the existing board was a nice improvement, but the pair decided that they could do even better and rolled out an entire custom PCB to mount the keys more ergonomically. The switches are Kailh Choc V2 Browns and seem to have done a great job of improving the responsiveness of the joystick’s side buttons. If you want to spin up your own version, they’ve made the PCBs available on their GitHub page.
While [ErkHal] notes the switches aren’t the best and were only used since they were available, they certainly appear to work much better than what the joystick shipped with originally. In fact, we recently saw similar switches used to make a custom mechanical keyboard made for the PinePhone.
Not bad for a noob and his adventure down this road will surely continue now that he has added a few tools to his belt. Sigh…I remember my first multimeter, it was garbage compared to the ones I have today but there was so much learning.
Question: can the joystick act as a mouse? I’m struggling to use my laptop trackpad outside in the cold and this might solve the issue.
Imagine a mouse that moves by itself to the center of the screen when you release it, that´s what you would get with a joystick.
There are some heated mouse pads and hand-warming mice around that you might want to try
Oh. Hadn’t thought of that! Might not be a problem for my use case – just pointing and clicking.
you would more likely use it as a rate control. most joysticks dont have the resolution to work as a mouse as a direct positional control.
There are a litney of programs that can take input from joysticks and convert it to an emulated mouse, especially on Windows. Xpadder is extremely easy if you’re not into scripting and AutoHotKey is available if you want a Swiss army knife sticking out of a loaded garage door. Linux gets a little complicated depending on your X server and Macs have several available in the app store.
i was pretty impressed with uinput on the raspberry pi. was very easy to make a driver for the i2c based adc i used to support joysticks and a blackberry trackball on my pi tablet. not sure if that’s there for other distros though.
I second uinput for Linux. Was just playing around with it, and it’s pretty handy.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/input/uinput.html
https://github.com/GrantEdwards/uinput-joystick-demo
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82064/how-to-get-the-actual-keyboard-device-given-the-output-of-proc-bus-input-device/507209#507209