Peripherals Hacks

1493 Articles

Maiden Kansas City Keyboard Meetup Was A Clacking Good Time

August 30, 2022 by 10 Comments

Wow! I can’t believe it already came and went — but the first annual (semi-annual?) Kansas City Keyboard Meetup was, in my opinion, a rousing success. And I think organizer and Discord-nominated god among men [Ricardo] agrees with me. (He does; I checked before we left the venue.)

First of all, the attendance was off the charts, perhaps thanks in part to our announcement last week. We aim to get you the news sooner next time, in case you want to come in from surrounding states and municipalities. RSVPs sat around 20-something, and then shot up to 60 or so in the days leading up. Fortunately, there were enough tiny sandwiches, granola bars, and s t i c k e r s to go around. I already put mine on my keebin’ toolbox.

The Hive Was Buzzing

The event took place at Hive Co-Working thanks to [Nick], and overall, the space turned out to be a good layout. We were set up right inside the windows looking out to the street, and I like to think that we drew in a few passers-by, though I am probably more than a little bit biased. I wondered aloud on the way home how a sandwich board out on the sidewalk would have affected the influx of randos.

My husband pointed out that even though we were all the way downtown, this is Kansas City and not New York City, and most of the keyboard enthusiasts about town were already accounted for. Hmpf. I still say we should try a sandwich board next time. We could go meta and mention the tiny sandwiches inside. Don’t worry — there was plenty of sanitizer and napkins to go around, plus a box of gloves.

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Giant Keyboard Is Just Our Type

August 27, 2022 by 17 Comments

We like big keyboards and we cannot lie, and we’ve seen some pretty big keyboards over the years. But this one — this one is probably the biggest working board that anyone has ever seen. [RKade] and [Kristine] set out to make the world’s largest keyboard by Guinness standards – and at 16 feet long, you would think they would be a shoe-in for the world record. More on that later.

As you might have figured out, what’s happening here is that each giant key actuates what we hope is a Cherry-brand lever switch that is wired to the pads of a normal-sized keyboard PCB. Once they designed the layout, they determined that there were absolutely no existing commercial containers that, when inverted, would fit the desired dimensions, so they figured out that it would take 350 pieces of cardboard to make 70 5-sided keycaps and got to work.

Aside from the general awesomeness of this thing, we really like the custom buttons, which are mostly made of PVC components, 3D printed parts, and a bungee cord for the return spring.

[RKade] encountered a few problems with the frame build — mostly warped boards and shrunken holes where each of the 70 keys mount. After the thing was all wired up (cleverly, we might add, with Ethernet cable pairs), [RKade] rebuilt the entire frame out of three-layers of particle board.

By the way, Guinness rejected the application, citing that it must be an exact replica of an existing keyboard, and it must be built to commercial/professional standards. They also contradict themselves, returning no search results for biggest keyboard, but offer upon starting a world record application that there is a record-holding keyboard on file after all, and it is 8 ft (2.4 m) long. It’s not the concrete Russian keyboard, which is non-functional, but we wonder if it might be the Razer from CES 2018 that uses Kailh Big Switches.

Once the keyboard was up and running, [RKade] and [Kristine] duke it out over a game of Typing Attack, where the loser has to type all the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up” on the giant keyboard. Check it out after the break.

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Deepdeck: Going Beyond The Macro Pad

August 20, 2022 by 4 Comments

We’re used to the idea of a macropad, a small extension keyboard for your computer whose keys can be programmed to the functions of your choice. They can be made in many ways, but they all follow a similar functionality. Deepdeck from [Nick Velasquez] is another matter, an attempt to make a macropad with functionality that goes way beyond simply pressing keys.

At its heart is an ESP32 module, and it makes full use of both Bluetooth and wireless networking capabilities. It can use Bluetooth when connecting to the host computer, and the wireless connection hosts both the configuration interface via a web server and an Internet connection from which it derives those special powers.  This is a macropad with programmable keys just like all the others, but it also has the ability to connect to online APIs programmed by the user. This allows it to automate complex queries involving other sources into a keypress, which gives it many more possibilities.

A tool such as this one is one of those things which requires a bit of thought as to exactly how it might be used. A normal API connected device might display the weather on a screen for instance, but how often does one need to type the weather forecast? However we can see that this extra online dimension will find as yet unseen applications, and we look forward to the idea being taken up with other macropads.

USB-C Charging Mod Brings In The Juice

August 16, 2022 by 13 Comments

By now we’re well under way with the consolidation of low-voltage power supplies under the USB-C standard, and the small reversible connector has become the de facto way to squirt some volts into our projects. But for all this standardization there are still a few places where the harmony of a unified connector breaks down, and things don’t work quite the way they are supposed to. One such case has occupied [James Ide] — devices which will accept power from a USB-A to USB-C cable, but not from a USB-C to USB-C one. His solution? A small flexible PCB upgrade.

The problem lies with how different power supplies and peripherals identify each other, and quite likely in device manufacturers skimping on a few components here and there. A compliant USB-C power supply expects to see pull-down resistors on the data lines, and will thus refuse to serve power to devices that don’t possess them. Meanwhile the USB-A supply will quite happily serve juice without such checks, which is what the manufacturer is relying on. The solution is a tiny flexible PCB with the resistors, designed to be retrofitted behind a USB-C socket. On one hand it’s probably one of the simplest circuits we’ve ever shown you, and on the other it’s a cleverly designed solution to the issue at hand.

If the nitty-gritty of USB-C interests you, then we’ve taken a much closer look in the past.

Thanks to [Andrea] for the tip.

Getting To The TrackPoint Quicker

August 15, 2022 by 10 Comments

Love it or hate it, TrackPoint can be a powerful tool. Love it or hate it, the idea of moving the mouse without removing your hands from the keys has an appeal. [Alon Swartz] incorporated one into his custom wired split mechanical keyboard and wrote a helpful guide on how to do it yourself.

The first step was to determine the pinout of the Trackpoint, which he provides a handy repository of various devices with annotations and pictures. The next step is swapping the little rubber nub at the top for something a bit longer. As the PCB sits below the keys, a labret cheek piercing happens to be a perfect candidate. Strong, thin, easily obtainable in different lengths, and threaded on one end. With jewelry in hand, [Alon] created a reset circuit with just a few resistors and a capacitor so the teensy can trigger a reset of the Trackpoint. The keyboard’s TMK firmware also needed a few tweaks to support reading the Trackpoint.

It’s a great guide, and we love the use of the jewelry as a piece of the keyboard. A knitting needle was used in a previous attempt to add a Trackpoint to a mechanical keyboard, and we’re excited to see what other household items end up in keyboards.

DIY Gaming Mouse Beats The Competition, Costs Less

August 15, 2022 by 33 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of custom keyboards here on Hackaday. Seriously, like more than we can count. But custom mice? Those are far more elusive. Though we wouldn’t be surprised to see that change should this excellent example from [Tyler Richard] catch on.

How the mouse sees the date on a US quarter

The goal was to build a customizable mouse that could match the performance of Logitech’s MX Master 3, but without the $100 USD price tag. In the end, [Tyler] says his mouse is around 10x as responsive thanks to a 1,000 Hz refresh rate, and the total cost is just a fraction of the retail price of the Logitech. Though as you might expect, there’s a catch or two.

For one thing, he says getting your hands on the PixArt PMW3389 mouse sensor in single quantities can be difficult. It seems like he was able to secure a sample because he’s a student, but you’ll have to figure out your own way to con secure one from the company. There’s also no friendly GUI to configure the mouse, and indeed, you’ll need to write some code should you want to modify any of its buttons. Oh, and despite the fact that the cheapo donor mouse you need to use for parts is wireless, the replacement guts you’ll be fitting it with currently only support wired operation.

Alright, we’ll admit it’s not perfect. But it’s still a huge step in the right direction if you care about being able to spin up your own input devices. With some refinement, and perhaps somebody willing to do bulk buy of the sensors, we could see this project becoming quite popular. In the meantime, you may have to settle for a macro stool.

Want To Use A Classic Mac Mouse On A Modern Computer? No? Here’s How To Do It Anyway

August 11, 2022 by 23 Comments

Need to hook a classic Mac mouse up to your modern machine with the help of a DIY USB adapter? [John Floren] has you covered. [John]’s solution uses a board with an ATmega32U4 microcontroller on it to connect to the Mac mouse on one end, and emulate a USB HID (Human Interface Device) on the other. A modern machine therefore recognizes it like it would any other USB input device.

Why is this necessary? The connector on the classic Mac mouse may look like a familiar DE-9 connector, but it is not an RS-232 device and wouldn’t work if it were plugged into a 9-pin serial port. The classic Mac mouse uses a different pinout, and doesn’t have much for brains on the inside. It relies on the host computer to read its encoders and button states directly.

This project is actually a bit of an update to a piece of earlier work [John] did in making a vintage Depraz mouse work with modern systems. He suspected that it wouldn’t take much to have it also work with a classic Mac mouse, and he was right — all it took was updating the pin connections and adding some pull-up resistors. The source code and design files are on GitHub.

Even if one does not particularly want to use a classic Mac mouse for daily work, there’s definitely value in this kind of thing for those who deal in vintage hardware: it allows one to function-check old peripherals without having to fire up a vintage machine.

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