This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout

September 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

The Ergonomic Handheld Mouse / Keyboard Alternative from [Shervin Emami] is an all-in-one solution for your keyboarding and cursor moving needs.

The core of this build is a ‘grip-strengthening’ device that’s sold to guitarists. While the actual benefit of these devices for guitarists is questionable — there are a few anecdotes any music teacher will tell you about classical pianists ruining their hands with similar devices — the device itself can be converted into a fantastic chording keyboard. All you really need for a full-functioned keyboard is a few buttons in a rugged shell, and this ‘grip strengthener’ has that going in spades.

Underneath the plungers for each button [Shervin] installed a magnet and a magnetic sensor, meaning these buttons are analog, and shouldn’t wear out ever. With just a little bit of code on a Tiny BLE board these analog sensors can become a keyboard, a quadcopter controller, an interface for your VR setup, or anything else that can be controlled with a bunch of buttons.

Not to outdo himself, [Shervin] also managed to add some cursor control functionality to this build. This is done via the IMU onboard the Tiny BLE board, and by all accounts it works great. You can check out a video of this build pretending it’s both a keyboard and a mouse below.

Continue reading “This Keyboard And Mouse Also Gives You A Workout” →

DIY Switches For People Who Can’t Push Switches

September 10, 2018 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

An outstanding number of things most people take for granted present enormous hurdles for people with physical disabilities, including interaction with computers and other digital resources. Assistive technologies such as adaptive switches allow users who cannot use conventional buttons or other input devices to interact with digital devices, and while there are commercial offerings there is still plenty of room for projects like [Cassio Batista]’s DIY Low-cost Assistive Technology Switches.

[Cassio]’s project focuses on non-contact switches, such as proximity and puff-based activations. These are economical, DIY options aimed at improving accessibility for people who are unable to physically push even specialized switches. There are existing products in this space, but cost can be a barrier and DIY options that use familiar interfaces greatly improves accessibility.

Assistive technologies that give people the tools they need to have more control over their own lives in a positive, healthy way is one of the more vibrant and positive areas of open hardware development, and it’s not always clear where the challenges lie when creating solutions. An example of this is the winner of the 2015 Hackaday Prize, the Eyedrivomatic, which allows one to interface the steering of an electric wheelchair to a gaze tracking system while permanently altering neither device; a necessity because users often do not own their hardware.

See Binary On Your Breadboard

September 8, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 48 Comments

When you’re debugging a board which has an ESP32, Raspberry Pi, or Arduino, it’s easy to slap on a small LCD display or connect via WiFi to see what’s wrong. At least, that’s what the kids are doing. But what if you’re old-school or you don’t have one of those pimped-out, steroid-filled boards? A resistor and an LED will often suffice. Powering the LED means one thing and not powering it means another. And with seven more LEDs you can even display 0-255 in binary.

[Miguel] is clearly in the latter camp. To make debugging-with-LEDs easy, he’s come up with an 8-LED board complete with resistors. He’s even included the Gerber files needed for you to make your own. One row of pins are all connected together and the other row are not. So whether you’re using common cathode or common anode depends on how you orient the LEDs when you solder them in place. You might perhaps have one board of each type at the ready.

But who are we kidding? This is just plain fun to have on a breadboard. Show your prototype doohickey to a friend and you know they’ll be drawn to the little binary counter in the corner pulsing 42 or counting down until it starts flashing 255.

At risk of getting too feature-rich, you could then add two keys for a binary keyboard or add more LEDs to display 32-bit binary Unix Epoch time and see how long until your friends figure that one out.

Continue reading “See Binary On Your Breadboard” →

Twenty Projects That Just Won The Human Computer Interface Challenge

September 5, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The greatest hardware competition on the planet is going on right now. The Hackaday Prize is the Oscars of Open Hardware. It’s the Nobel Prize of building a thing. It’s the Fields Medal of firmware development, and simply making it to the finals grants you a knighthood in the upper echelon of hardware developers.

Last week, we wrapped up the fourth challenge in The Hackaday Prize, the Human Computer Interface challenge. Now we’re happy to announce twenty of those projects have been selected to move onto the final round and have been awarded a $1000 cash prize. Congratulations to the winners of the Human Computer Interface Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. Here are the winners, in no particular order:

Human Computer Interface Challenge Hackaday Prize Finalists:

Continue reading “Twenty Projects That Just Won The Human Computer Interface Challenge” →

Printed It: Logitech C270 Conversion

September 4, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

One of the most practical applications for a home 3D printer is the ability to produce replacement parts; why wait a week for somebody to ship you a little plastic widget when you’ve got a machine that can manufacture a facsimile of it in a couple of hours? But what if your skills and passion for the smell of melting PLA push you even farther? You might move on from printing replacement parts to designing and building whole new devices and assemblies. Arguably this could be considered “peak” 3D printing: using a printer to create new devices which would otherwise be difficult or impractical for an individual to manufacture by more traditional means.

A perfect example is this fantastic total conversion for the Logitech C270 webcam designed by [Luc Eeckelaert]. Officially he calls it a “tripod”, and perhaps that’s how the design started, but the final product is clearly much more than that. It puts the normally monitor-mounted Logitech camera onto an articulated arm, greatly improving the device’s usability. The conversion even includes the ability to manually adjust the focus, a feature the original hardware doesn’t have. It turns the affordable and widely available Logitech C270 into an excellent camera to have on the workbench for documenting projects, or pointing at the bed of your 3D printer.

Continue reading “Printed It: Logitech C270 Conversion” →

Power Over Ethernet Splitter Improves Negotiating Skills

August 24, 2018 by Ben James 18 Comments

Implementing PoE is made interesting by the fact that not every Ethernet device wants power; if you start dumping power onto any device that’s connected, you’re going to break things. The IEEE 802.3af standard states that the device which can source power should detect the presence of the device receiving power, before negotiating the power level. Only once this process is complete can the power sourcing device give its full supply. Of course, this requires the burden of smarts, meaning that there are many cheap devices available which simply send power regardless of what’s plugged in (passive PoE).

[Jason Gin] has taken an old, cheap passive PoE splitter and upgraded it to be 802.3af compatible (an active device). The splitter was designed to be paired with a passive injector and therefore did not work with Jason’s active 802.3at infrastructure.

The brain of the upgrade is a TI TPS2378 Powered Device controller, which does the power negotiation. It sits on one of two new boards, with a rudimentary heatsink provided by some solar cell tab wire. The second board comprises the power interface, and consists of dual Schottky bridges as well a 58-volt TVS diode to deal with any voltage spikes due to cable inductance. The Ethernet transformer shown in the diagram above was salvaged from a dead Macbook and, after some enamel scraping and fiddly soldering, it was fit for purpose. For a deeper dive on Ethernet transformers and their hacked capabilities, [Jenny List] wrote a piece specifically focusing on Raspberry Pi hardware.

[Jason]’s modifications were able to fit in the original box, and the device successfully integrated with his 802.3at setup. We love [Jason]’s work and have previously written about his eMMC adventures, repairing windows tablets and explaining the intricacies of SD card interfacing.

Custom Designed Keyboard Needs A Custom Made Metal Case

August 5, 2018 by Rich Hawkes 9 Comments

It’s hardly news that mechanical keyboard users love their keyboards. When it comes to custom keyboards, though, [Cameron Sun] has taken things to the next level, by designing his own keyboard and then having the case custom milled from aluminum. If a Macbook and an ErgoDox had a baby, it would look like this!

[Cameron] had been using a 60 percent keyboard (a keyboard with around 60% of the keys of a standard keyboard) but missed the dedicated arrow keys, as well as home/end and pgup/pgdown keys. Thus began the quest for the ultimate keyboard! Or, at least, the ultimate keyboard for [Cameron.]

Keyboards begin and end with a layout, so [Cameron] started with keyboard-layout-editor.com, a site where you can create your own keyboard layout with the number of keys you’d like. The layout was a bit challenging for [Cameron] using the online tool, so the editing was moved into Adobe Illustrator. Once the layout was designed, it was time to move on to the case. Wood was considered, but ultimately, aluminum was decided upon and the basic shape was milled and then the key holes were cut using a water jet.

An interesting addition to the keyboard were three toggle switches. These allow [Cameron] to choose a modified layout for use when gaming, and also to move some of the keys’ locations so that one side of the keyboard can be used for gaming.

Custom keyboard layouts are getting more and more popular and there are lots of DIY cases to hold those layouts. [Cameron] has upped the ante when it comes to cases, though. If you’re interested in building your own keyboard, we have you covered with articles like The A to Z of Building Your Own Keyboard. If you’re looking for more custom cases, perhaps a concrete one is what you want?

Via Reddit.